APPENDIX (3)

In the inquiry made in January 1946 some further work was done on the subject of reactions to advertisements in newspapers and magazines. It seemed important to secure information on the reaction of the general public to the newspaper advertisements as normally seen. For this purpose, all informants were shown full size photostat reproductions of (a) a page in the Radio Times (b) a page in the Daily Mail (c) a page in the Empire News. In these three pages the road safety advertisement was one only of many advertisements and was, of course, in the setting in which it would normally be seen. Informants were asked to look at the three sheets one by one, and to select which of the advertisements they personally would be most likely to notice.

It is clear that as the interview was about road safety, informants might have been biased in the selection of advertisements by the preceding conversation with the interviewer. To counter this, all informants were asked to consider the sheets as objectively

as possible ,with a view to helping the Government decide which kind of advertisements it should concentrate upon. As a check on the extent to which the informant's selection was biased by the interview, a control sample of 200 informants, selected in the same way as the basic sample, were shown the three newspaper sheets, and asked the same question as the other informants about these sheets. The control sample however, was not asked any of the road safety questions, and so far as these 200 were concerned, the interview consisted solely of questions about the three newspaper sheets.

The page of the Radio Times consisted entirely of advertisements. The Road Safety advertisement, which was “I couldn’t see him for fog, mister”, occupied a top central position on the page. Immediately below this was another government advertisement appealing for nurses. They were the two longest advertisement on the page and occupied all the space of the central section from top to bottom. Down each side of the page were three commercial advertisements.

The page of the Daily Mail consisted mainly of news columns and pictures. There were nine advertisements on this page, these placed on the lower half of the page down each side. The advertisements were of various sizes, the Road Safety advertisement being the largest and the only government advertisement. It occupied the bottom right hand corner of the page. The advertisement was “My brakes let me down on the hill”.

The page of Empire News had advertisements all down the left hand side and down the right hand side except for the top six inches, the central part of the page being occupied by film criticisms, a story, an article, and a crossword puzzle. The Road Safety advertisement which was “He ran out from nowhere” was the top advertisement on the right hand side. The top advertisement on the left hand side was an appeal for nurses and the bottom advertisement on the left was an appeal for fuel economy. These three advertisements were slightly longer than the others on the page, and were the only government ones. There were altogether eleven advertisements on the page.

In the table below the proportions of the main sample and of the control sample that selected the Road Safety advertisements and others are shown.

It will be seen that the results for the main sample and the control sample were very similar. It can therefore be safely assumed that informants’ answers in the main sample were not influenced by the fact that they had just been interviewed on the subject of road safety.

The advertisement chosen by the greatest proportion is in each case the Road Safety advertisement. In the case of the Radio Times 64% chose Road Safety and in the case of Empire News nearly a half did so.

The proportions choosing the Road Safety advertisements from one, two and all three pages and not from any of the pages are shown below.

Once again the results for the main sample and the control sample are similar. 32% chose the Road Safety advertisement in all three cases and only 1 6% did not choose a Road Safety advertisement at all.

It is clear from these results that the Road Safety advertisements compare favourably with other advertisements so far as the power of attracting attention is concerned.