Abstract:

Advertisers and agencies pay considerable attention to the quality of colour reproduction in print advertisements.This paper is concerned with the extent and manner in which inevitable variations in reproduction between different magazines, caused by the use of different printing techniques and qualities of paper, affect the performance of the advertisements within those magazines. This paper describes one test designed to explore the extent to which colour variations are likely to actually affect the impact of the advertising. One test cannot lead to a conclusion, but the results suggest that readers see advertisements in the context of the magazine they are reading, the communication achieved by an advertisement being more influenced by their liking for the magazine than by variations in colour quality.