Moderating Role of Brand Familiarity in Cross-Media Effects: An Information Processing Perspective

Cross-media advertising campaigns have become commonplace in today's multimedia environment. Drawing from the multiple source effect theorization, this study explores the underlying mechanism of media synergistic effect from an information processing perspective. Brand familiarity is proposed as a moderator of cross-media effects: people with different levels of prior brand-related knowledge tend to process advertisements in diverse cognitive routes. An experiment found that for an unfamiliar brand, media synergy outperformed repeated exposures via a solo medium in terms of raising message credibility and generating more positive thoughts, while similar effects were not seen on a familiar brand.