Professors Choi, Daugherty, and Wagner receive 2004 Summer Research Assignments

Three assistant professors in the Department of Advertising, Dr. Marina Choi, Dr. Terry Daugherty, and Dr. Carson Wagner have been awarded 2004 Summer Research Assignments from the Office of Graduate Studies at UT. The department is proud as these awards are campus wide competitions, very prestigious to receive, and the Department of Advertising received three of these awards based on faculty submissions, more than any other department on campus. Summer Research Assignment awards are administered through the Faculty Development Program in the Office of the Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Summer Research Assignments are awarded through a peer review process and provide summer session leaves for assistant professors to concentrate on research.

All three professors are working on interesting projects. Dr. Choi's research is titled Celebrities in Advertising across Cultures: Investigating Similarities and Differences in Consumer Responses in the United States and Korea. She states, "Coming from another culture myself, I always find cross-cultural consumer behavior as an intriguing topic to research. With my continuing commitment to this area, I will conduct a cross-cultural study this summer to examine the potentially varied consumer responses to celebrity endorsement across cultures and understand why. Preliminary findings of my previous research on this topic suggest some interesting differences in the use of this technique across different countries."

This current study is based on the fact that global communication has become an increasingly important part of today's businesses, and there has been a convergence of values across cultures, especially among young people. Some argue, however, that although there appear to be many commonalities among cultures, these similarities may exist only on the surface while core values may remain divergent. For international advertisers, it is essential to understand the potentially varied effectiveness of advertising techniques as used across cultures.

Dr. Choi's research is one of the first studies to be undertaken on celebrity endorsement effectiveness across cultures and will significantly expand the current literature on both celebrity endorsements and cross-cultural consumer behavior. Little has been known about the impacts of cultural differences on the effectiveness of specific advertising techniques and the underlying mechanism of the process among young adults around the world. Findings from the proposed study can also aid international advertisers in assessing whether and to what degree a celebrity endorser strategy is effective across cultures, as well as potentially enhance endorser selection.

Choi comments, "I am delighted to receive the research award that allows me to carry out research outside the U.S. as well as recognizes the significance of the proposed project. I hope my research will help to unravel the complexity of international advertising that is of prime interest to many advertisers."

Dr. Terry Daugherty has spent time looking at how advertising research has consistently sought to explore the practices and theory of understanding audience behavior in order to communicate the most effective messages within the most appropriate media. However, the mass media has incontrovertibly undergone a transformation during the past twenty-five years. During this time, we have seen the emergence of new media, the proliferation of thousands of vehicles, and the alteration of how users consume media. As a result of these evolutionary changes, there remains a great deal of uncertainty calling for actionable research to address the most imperative concerns taking place in this complex environment. Therefore, Dr. Daugherty will use his award to conduct a series of experiments investigating media convergence. He comments, "Additional work in this area is warranted because of the changing dynamics of how people use media. In this age of information, the mass media undeniably plays as vital a role as ever before in our lives and we need to do a better job at understanding at how information is gathered, processed, and used through the media in society."

Furthermore, the time and data gathered will be used to establish a Media Research Lab at UT. The purpose of the research lab will be to conduct high impact social science research exploring important strategic, social, and technological issues involving the media. Daugherty states, "The lab will be designed to serve UT's core educational objectives by providing students and faculty with the necessary infrastructure support to conduct cutting edge media research. The establishment of a Media Research Lab represents a significant opportunity to provide a learning environment where research investigating message design and media delivery converge and would serve as a vital asset not only for the department, but also for the college and university."

Dr. Wagner will use the grant to further investigate the effects of anti-drug ads on strength of association. He states, "Similar to the problems that plagued research on stereotyping and prejudice, anti-drug ad research tends to suffer from a lack of veridical measures that assess study participants' underlying feelings--those they wouldn't divulge or wouldn't want to admit to themselves--about drug use. Unfortunately, you simply can't ask people about their attitudes toward drugs, show them some anti-drug ads, and then ask 'now how do you feel about illicit drugs?' It's very unlikely that the answers you receive will bear any similarity to those participants' would give when actually faced with the question of whether or not to try drugs."

4/21/2004