Explicit and Implicit assimilation and contrast effects of subtle and blatant advertising.

An experiment demonstrated that subtle advertising produces assimilation of the persuasive message, whereas blatant advertising produces contrast, both in explicit and implicit attitudes. This finding suggests a parallelism between the “Reversed Priming Effect” (Glaser & Banaji, 1999) and the Flexible Correction Theory (Wegener & Petty, 1995). Furthermore, changes disappeared 48 hours after the treatment, but only in the implicit measure. This finding suggests that implicit and explicit attitudes change according to the rules of different memory systems. Specifically, implicit attitudes change according to the rules of a slow-learning (associative) system, whereas explicit attitudes change according to a fast-binding (rule-based) system (cf. McClelland, McNaughton and O’Reilly, 1995). These results also provide evidence that subtle advertising may be more effective than blatant advertising, which can sometimes be counterproductive.