Dr. Terry Daugherty Receives Grant
The Advertising department is proud to announce assistant Professor, Dr. Terry Daugherty was recently awarded a grant in the amount of $6,000 through the Research Grant program offered by the Office of the Vice President for Research at The University of Texas at Austin. It is a campus wide competition designed to provide modest support for specific research projects of individual tenured and tenure-track faculty. Proposals are peer reviewed with funding awarded to those that demonstrate a clearly defined research project and plan to secure additional external support.
Daugherty comments "I am honored to receive this award because it represents a high level of support and commitment from the University for my research program." He plans to use the funding from this award to empirically investigate how the competition for cognitive resources influences the processing of advertising information when message intensity is varied across media.
Daugherty explains that very little empirical evidence exists for measuring the effectiveness of advertising across multiple sensory modalities because the majority of media do not provide the necessary sensory stimulation to challenge our senses. For example, radio is limited to auditory information, newspapers rely on visual examination, magazines depend on visual and the occasional olfactory fragrance, television relies on visual and auditory stimulation, and the Internet has the ability to combine visual and auditory sensory information with motor feedback.
Work in this area has failed to fully explore the intensity of advertising messages across media focusing instead on isolating the message and medium separately when testing an ad's effectiveness. However, because the media, and messages communicated within, rely on our perceptual system, the interaction between the two can strain our ability to process information causing a competition for cognitive resources. The implication of this interference between modalities on advertising effectiveness becomes increasingly more important for multi-sensory media. He states, "The project is significant in that it could serve to advance the theoretical understanding of how advertising message design and delivery interact, aid industry professionals in making strategic advertising decisions, and initiate a long-range programmatic research effort in a new area of research."
Dr. Daugherty is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Advertising at the University of Texas at Austin. He completed his doctoral work from Michigan State University's highly ranked Mass Media program followed by a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at eLab in the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on understanding consumer behavior and strategic media management, with work appearing in the Journal of Advertising, Journal of Interactive Advertising, Journal of Consumer Psychology, and the Journal of Interactive Marketing, among others.
4/13/2004