Stupefying ads: Does advertising that underestimates our intelligence make us stupid?

Sammanfattning: The marketing landscape seems to experience a worrying trend where consumers' intelligence is underestimated and insulted. However, little is known about the unintended effects these types of advertisements have on consumers. This study aims to place advertising in a wider context and add to the knowledge about advertisements that underestimate consumers' intelligence and explore if these types of advertisements can affect consumers' cognitive ability. A quantitative approach was applied where a survey-based experiment with 681 Swedish respondents was conducted. The experimental group was exposed to three different types of advertisements that underestimate consumers' intelligence, whereas the control group was exposed to a neutral advertisement. The experiment measured cognitive ability, processing fluency, persuasion knowledge, arousal and ad skepticism. The results show that consumers' cognitive ability can be affected by advertisements that underestimate their intelligence if they contain overly simple messages and therefore are difficult to process. The findings also indicate that the magnitude and direction of the priming effect on cognitive ability can be affected consumers' ad skepticism.