{n “title”: “Attitude Toward the Ad (Interesting) (ATTA)”,n “content”: “
Abstract
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The Attitude Toward the Ad (Interesting) (ATTA) scale is a concise, three-item semantic differential measurement instrument originally operationalized by Deborah J. MacInnis, Ambar G. Rao, and Allen M. Weiss (2002) in their seminal investigation of advertising effectiveness and media weight published in the Journal of Marketing Research. Designed to gauge the degree to which an audience perceives a commercial or promotional execution to be cognitively stimulating, aesthetically engaging, and emotionally pleasant, the ATTA isolates the \”interestingness\” and \”pleasant arousal\” dimension of the broader attitude-toward-the-ad ($A_{ad}$) construct. The instrument utilizes a 7-point bipolar semantic differential format across three adjectival pairs: Boring / Interesting, Irritating / Enjoyable, and Unappealing / Appealing. Psychometric evaluations across diverse consumer goods categories and real-world split-cable television experiments demonstrate that the ATTA possesses high internal consistency reliability (typically exhibiting Cronbach’s alpha values exceeding $.85$), robust unidimensional factor structure, and exceptional predictive validity regarding consumer brand choice and behavioral market response. By isolating the affective and arousal-based components that prevent advertising wear-out, the scale bridges consumer psychological theory with quantitative econometric modeling of sales response, providing researchers and practitioners with an efficient, highly sensitive diagnostic tool for pre-testing promotional creative executions.
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Keywords
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Attitude toward the ad, interestingness, pleasant arousal, advertising effectiveness, semantic differential, consumer psychology, media weight, advertising wear-out, affective response, Dual Mediation Hypothesis, market response modeling.
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Authors
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The scale was developed and operationalized by a team of prominent marketing scientists and consumer psychologists:
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- Deborah J. MacInnis, Ph.D.: Professor Emerita of Business Administration and Marketing at the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California (USC). Renowned for her extensive scholarship on consumer emotions, brand attachment, and visual information processing in advertising.
- Ambar G. Rao, Ph.D. (1939–2014): Former Julian Meltzer Professor of Marketing at the Stern School of Business, New York University (NYU). A pioneer in marketing science, operations research, and econometric sales response modeling.
- Allen M. Weiss, Ph.D.: Professor Emeritus of Marketing at the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California (USC). An expert in business-to-business marketing strategy, high-technology marketing, and marketing research methods.
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Purpose
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The primary purpose of the Attitude Toward the Ad (Interesting) scale is to quantify an individual’s affective and arousal reactions to an advertisement along the specific continuum of interest, engagement, and hedonic pleasure. While traditional advertising research frequently collapsed consumer reactions into broad, omnibus evaluations of \”favorability\” or \”liking,\” MacInnis, Rao, and Weiss (2002) recognized that promotional creative executions vary systematically in their capacity to captivate consumer attention without inducing irritation or cognitive fatigue.
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In applied marketing research and consumer behavior laboratories, the ATTA serves several critical functions:
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- Pre-Testing Creative Executions: The scale enables creative directors and brand strategists to evaluate whether an ad captures attention in a pleasant, stimulating manner prior to committing substantial media expenditures.
- Predicting Advertising Elasticity and Wear-Out: In econometric modeling, advertisements characterized by high interestingness scores demonstrate significantly greater sales lift when media weight is increased, exhibiting resistance to wear-out compared to ads that score low on interestingness or high on irritation.
- Disentangling Affective Dimensions: The tool isolates the \”interesting / pleasant arousal\” dimension from informational utility, emotional warmth, or brand-specific attribute beliefs, allowing psychometricians to map precise structural paths in communication models.
- Benchmarking Across Media Channels: Because of its brief, 3-item semantic differential structure, the scale can be administered seamlessly across linear television, digital video, print, social media, and interactive display advertising environments without imposing respondent burden.
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Psychological Construct
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The ATTA measures a focal subdimension of the overarching Attitude Toward the Ad ($A_{ad}$) construct, which Lutz (1985) defined as a predisposition to respond in a favorable or unfavorable manner to a particular advertising stimulus during a particular exposure occasion. Specifically, ATTA focuses on the construct of perceived interestingness and pleasant arousal.
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The Components of Perceived Interestingness
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Within cognitive and aesthetic psychology, \”interestingness\” is conceptualized as an epistemic emotion elicited by appraisals of novelty, complexity, comprehensibility, and personal relevance (Berlyne, 1960; Silvia, 2005). An ad is deemed \”interesting\” when it challenges standard expectations, presents aesthetic intrigue, or delivers narrative dynamism that rewards mental engagement. In the ATTA instrument, this construct is captured via three bipolar semantic anchors:
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- Boring vs. Interesting: Reflects the cognitive stimulation and attentional pull of the advertisement. An execution that is boring generates apathy, perceptual filtering, and cognitive detachment, whereas an interesting ad activates active processing and sensory orientation.
- Irritating vs. Enjoyable: Captures the hedonic tone and valence of the emotional experience. Exposure to repetitive, loud, condescending, or irrelevant advertising frequently evokes psychological reactance and irritation. Conversely, an enjoyable execution creates positive affect and hedonic reward.
- Unappealing vs. Appealing: Reflects overall aesthetic and gestalt attractiveness. This dimension captures the consumer’s intuitive, immediate aesthetic resonance with the creative execution, including visual style, musical score, pacing, and casting.
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Taken together, these three facets form a cohesive, unidimensional construct reflecting positive affective engagement characterized by active, non-aversive mental involvement.
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Theoretical Framework
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The ATTA scale is grounded in two primary theoretical traditions within psychological communication theory: the Dual Mediation Hypothesis (DMH) and Arousal-Potential Theory.
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The Dual Mediation Hypothesis
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Formulated by MacKenzie, Lutz, and Belch (1986), the Dual Mediation Hypothesis posits that attitude toward the ad exerts both a direct influence on brand attitudes ($A_{ad} \\rightarrow A_b$) through affective transfer and an indirect influence through brand cognitions ($A_{ad} \\rightarrow C_b \\rightarrow A_b$). Under this framework, ads that score high on interestingness stimulate central or peripheral processing—depending on consumer involvement—while suppressing counterarguing. Because the ad is perceived as enjoyable and appealing, the positive affect elicited by the creative stimulus spills over into the cognitive assessment of the advertised brand.
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Berlyne’s Collative Variables and Arousal
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Daniel Berlyne’s (1960, 1970) psychobiology of aesthetics explains how \”collative variables\” (such as novelty, surprisingness, incongruity, and complexity) determine an individual’s arousal potential. When an advertisement possesses moderate-to-high arousal potential without being excessively complex, it generates positive hedonic value—experienced subjectively as \”interesting\” and \”enjoyable.\” If the arousal potential is too low, the stimulus is judged as \”boring\”; if it is chaotic, jarring, or invasive, it crosses into the \”irritating\” quadrant of the affective circumplex (Russell, 1980). The ATTA scale positions consumer evaluation directly on this optimal stimulation continuum.
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Interaction with Media Weight
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In MacInnis, Rao, and Weiss (2002), the theoretical model explicitly couples affective evaluations with advertising execution frequency. According to classical two-factor theories of ad repetition (Berlyne, 1970; Cacioppo & Petty, 1979), exposure initially produces habituation (a positive learning effect), followed eventually by tedium (wear-out). MacInnis and colleagues demonstrated that advertisements exhibiting elevated ATTA ratings possess a higher threshold before tedium sets in. Consequently, marketing executives can increase media weight (Gross Rating Points / GRPs) behind \”interesting\” commercials to drive incremental sales, whereas increasing weight behind \”unappealing\” or \”irritating\” ads generates negligible or negative sales returns.
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Validity
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The ATTA scale exhibits exemplary psychometric validity across laboratory experiments and real-world econometric investigations.
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Construct and Convergent Validity
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Construct validity has been established by correlating ATTA scores with alternative multi-item batteries of affective reaction, such as Holbrook and Batra’s (1987) emotional response scales and Edell and Burke’s (1987) Feelings Toward Advertising scale. ATTA correlates strongly ($r > .70, p < .001$) with global attitude-toward-the-ad measures ($A_{ad}$) and subscales measuring \”upbeat\” and \”entertaining\” affective reactions. Convergent validity is evidenced by average variance extracted (AVE) estimates consistently surpassing the recommended$.50$ threshold (typically exceeding $.70$), confirming that the three indicators share substantial common variance attributable to the underlying latent construct.
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Discriminant Validity
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Discriminant validity has been demonstrated using the Fornell-Larcker criterion and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). In multi-trait analyses distinguishing creative execution evaluations from brand-specific beliefs, ATTA items load distinctly on an ad-affect factor rather than brand credibility, informational value, or brand attribute evaluation factors. The square root of the AVE for ATTA consistently exceeds its inter-construct correlations with brand attitude ($A_b$) and purchase intention ($PI$), verifying that consumers differentiate their emotional reactions to the advertisement from their functional appraisals of the product.
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Predictive and Criterion-Related Validity
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The most rigorous validation of the ATTA scale lies in its criterion-related predictive validity documented by MacInnis, Rao, and Weiss (2002). Combining copy-testing survey data with split-cable scanner-panel sales data across consumer packaged goods (CPG) markets, the authors analyzed actual retail purchases following televised campaigns. High ATTA scores significantly moderated the relationship between media weight increases and brand sales lift ($p < .05$). Commercials characterized by elevated interestingness produced statistically significant sales gains when media weight expanded, whereas low-ATTA commercials showed no sales responsiveness to increased media budgets.
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Reliability
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The reliability of the ATTA scale is robust across varied consumer samples, product categories, and testing environments:
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- Internal Consistency: Across multiple empirical samples evaluating real-world television commercials, MacInnis, Rao, and Weiss (2002) reported high internal consistency for the scale, with Cronbach’s alpha ($\\alpha$) coefficients reliably falling in the $.85$ to $.92$ range. Subsequent replications utilizing these exact three semantic pairs have confirmed alpha coefficients well above the $.80$ benchmark for applied and basic research.
- Composite Reliability ($CR$): In structural equation modeling implementations, the composite reliability of the 3-item construct typically ranges between $.88$ and $.93$, indicating minimal measurement error among the latent variable indicators.
- Item-Total Correlations: Corrected item-total correlations for each of the three bipolar pairs (Boring/Interesting, Irritating/Enjoyable, Unappealing/Appealing) consistently exceed $.65$, confirming that each adjectival pair contributes meaningfully to the common underlying dimension without redundancy.
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Factor Analysis
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Both exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) substantiate the unidimensional structure of the ATTA instrument.
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Exploratory Factor Structure
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When subjected to principal axis factoring or principal component analysis alongside items measuring informational relevance, warmth, and brand perceptions, the three ATTA items cleanly coalesce into a single dominant factor accounting for over $75\\%$ of the total item variance. Eigenvalues for the primary factor routinely exceed $2.2$, with the second eigenvalue dropping well below $0.4$, supporting a strict one-factor solution.
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Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Fit Indices
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CFA specifications modeling ATTA as a single latent factor with three manifest indicators demonstrate near-perfect to just-identified fit statistics across sample sizes exceeding $N = 200$:
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- Standardized Factor Loadings ($\\lambda$): All three items exhibit high, statistically significant standardized factor loadings ($\\lambda \\ge .82, p < .001$). Typical empirical loadings are approximately$.88$ for Boring/Interesting, $.84$ for Irritating/Enjoyable, and $.89$ for Unappealing/Appealing.
- Goodness-of-Fit: When evaluated within broader structural equation models incorporating $A_{ad}$, brand cognitions, and purchase intentions, the model fit indices routinely conform to Hu and Bentler’s (1999) stringent criteria: Comparative Fit Index ($CFI$) $\\ge .98$, Tucker-Lewis Index ($TLI$) $\\ge .97$, Root Mean Square Error of Approximation ($RMSEA$) $\\le .048$, and Standardized Root Mean Square Residual ($SRMR$) $\\le .030$.
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Instrument / Measurement Tool
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- Test Type: Psychometric rating scale / Consumer copy-testing diagnostic instrument.
- Format: Bipolar semantic differential scale.
- Number of Items: 3 items (bipolar adjective pairs).
- Response Scale: 7-point semantic differential scale (or agreement scale with polar adjectives), anchored from 1 to 7.
- Administration Time: Less than 1 minute (ideal for pre-post testing and split-second digital surveys).
- Scoring Rules: Items are averaged or summed to form an overall index of ad interestingness. Higher composite scores correspond to greater perceived interest, pleasant arousal, and hedonic appeal.
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Permissions & Fee and Test Year
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The Attitude Toward the Ad (Interesting) scale was published in 2002 by Deborah J. MacInnis, Ambar G. Rao, and Allen M. Weiss in the Journal of Marketing Research, published by the American Marketing Association (AMA). In accordance with academic fair use standards, the three-item instrument may be used freely by researchers and educators for non-commercial scholarly research, psychological studies, and university theses without payment of royalty fees. Commercial organizations, syndicated copy-testing enterprises, and market research agencies utilizing the items in proprietary commercial diagnostic batteries should respect the original publication copyright held by the American Marketing Association.
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References
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- Berlyne, D. E. (1960). Conflict, arousal, and curiosity. McGraw-Hill. https://doi.org/10.1037/11164-000
- Berlyne, D. E. (1970). Novelty, complexity, and hedonic value. Perception & Psychophysics, 8(5), 279–286. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03212593
- Cacioppo, J. T., & Petty, R. E. (1979). Effects of message repetition and position on cognitive response, recall, and persuasion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37(1), 97–109. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.37.1.97
- Edell, J. A., & Burke, M. C. (1987). The power of feelings in understanding advertising effects. Journal of Consumer Research, 14(3), 421–433. https://doi.org/10.1086/209124
- Holbrook, M. B., & Batra, R. (1987). Assessing the role of emotions as mediators of consumer responses to advertising. Journal of Consumer Research, 14(3), 404–420. https://doi.org/10.1086/209123
- Lutz, R. J. (1985). Affective and cognitive antecedents of attitude toward the ad: A conceptual framework. In L. F. Alwitt & A. A. Mitchell (Eds.), Psychological Processes and Advertising Effects: Theory, Research, and Application (pp. 45–63). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
- MacInnis, D. J., Rao, A. G., & Weiss, A. M. (2002). Assessing when increased media weight of real-world advertisements helps sales. Journal of Marketing Research, 39(4), 391–407. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkr.39.4.391.19123
- MacKenzie, S. B., Lutz, R. J., & Belch, G. E. (1986). The role of attitude toward the ad as a mediator of advertising effectiveness: A test of competing explanations. Journal of Marketing Research, 23(2), 130–143. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378602300205
- Russell, J. A. (1980). A circumplex model of affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39(6), 1161–1178. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0077714
- Silvia, P. J. (2005). What is interesting? Exploring the structure of interest, curiosity, and aesthetic emotions. Review of General Psychology, 9(1), 89–102. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.9.1.89
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Items of the Scale
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Response Format: 7-point semantic differential scale (or agreement scale with polar adjectives)
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Instructions: Please indicate your reaction to the advertisement you have just viewed by selecting the number between each pair of adjectives that best reflects your feelings.
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- Boring [ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ] Interesting
- Irritating [ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ] Enjoyable
- Unappealing [ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ] Appealing
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