Music is one of the prominent features of television advertising. However, it is rarely known which characteristics of the music may have distracting or facilitative effects on the processing of the advertising messages. This study addresses this issue, presenting an experiment designed and executed to identify the contexts where the background music may facilitate or distract the message processing.
Experimental results suggest that the role of background music as information is important. If the role of background music as information is enhanced, background music has a negative effect on message processing when compared with the cases where there were no music in the advertising. Reversely, if it is suppressed, background music may have a positive effect on message processing. Also, this study implies that the emotion generated by the background music may be one of the important elements which influence the advertising effectiveness.
