Artificial, cheap, fake: Free associations as a research method for outdoor billboard advertising and visual pollution

Abstract

The free association method is often employed in marketing research to investigate perceptions of a particular product or brand in different socio-cultural groups of customers. In our research, international and domestic students produced free associations in response to photographs of outdoor billboards from two different locations in one city (city centre and outskirts). The results indicate that free associations can depict qualitative aspects of outdoor billboards like poor quality (relating to the categories of amateurish and fake), problematic content (relating to female stereotypes, gender stereotypes and cultural differences), and that they have the potential to capture the general atmosphere of the neighbourhood (categories of decay, depression, danger and past).

Untitled

“…Wei et al (2021) defined three factors of incentive framing: call to action, definiteness, and incentive forms to identify the most effective ways to design incentives for outdoor interactive advertisements. Urban et al (2020) recognised the association method as a possibility to evaluate the effectiveness of outdoor billboards. Wang et al (2022) stated that the exposure strength, advertisement matching degree, and advertising repetition effect could characterise the advertising influence and effectiveness.…”

A Systematic Review on the Extant of Outdoor Advertisements Literature in Developing Countries

“…While accurate estimates of the exact contribution of distraction to crashes are difficult to obtain, it is conservatively estimated that approximately 30% of all crashes involve driver distraction (Wang et al, 2019), with concern that roadside advertising, in the form of digital billboards, may be a significant component of the distraction from outside the vehicle. According to a recent research, roadside advertising has an influence on driver behavior, but the impact varies depending on the qualities of the driver and the features of the advertisement (Oviedo-Trespalacios et al, 2019;Shechter, 2005;Urban et al, 2020). Several simulator and on-road studies have been conducted to date to investigate the effect of billboards on various metrics of driving performance.…”

Investigating the Effect of Outdoor Advertising on Consumer Decisions: An Eye-Tracking and A/B Testing Study of Car Drivers’ Perception

“…Branding: Outdoor advertising can be used to reinforce brand identity and to create an impression on potential customers [19,20].…”