The Differential Interaction of Auditory and Visual Advertising Elements with Chinese and English

Multimedia advertisements often contain nonverbal auditory elements, such as music and sound effects, and nonverbal visual elements, such as images and logos. On the one hand, these elements can have the unintended negative effect of interfering with the processing of the verbal ad copy. Two experiments demonstrate that auditory elements interfere more with the learning of and cognitive responding to English ad copy than with Chinese ad copy, and vice versa for visual elements. On the other hand, auditory and visual elements have the intended positive effect of facilitating ad copy recall when they are reinstated as part of an integrated marketing campaign or as a recall cue in an advertising tracking study. A third experiment demonstrates that auditory elements are better retrieval cues for English than for Chinese ad copy, and vice versa for visual elements. The authors discuss implications of these cross-linguistic differences for the effective design of multimedia communications, integrated marketing campaigns, advertising tracking studies, and cross-cultural research.