This series of experiments
suggested accordingly that the memory value of a fourth-page
advertisement is much smaller than one fourth of the memory-value of
a full-page advertisement, and that of an eighth-page again much
smaller than one half of the psychical value of a fourth-page. The
customer who pays for one eighth of a page receives not the eighth
part, but hardly the twentieth part of the psychical influence which
is produced by a full page.
These experiments, which were carried on in various forms, demanded as
a natural supplement a study of the effects of repetition in relation
to size. This was the object of a series of tests which I carried on
recently in the Harvard laboratory. I constructed the following
material: 60 sheets of Bristol board in folio size were covered with
advertisements which were cut from magazines the size of the "Saturday
Evening Post" and the "Ladies' Home Journal." We used advertisements
ranging from full-page to twelfth-page in size. Every one of the 6
full-page advertisements which we used occurred only once, each of the
12 half-page advertisements was given 2 times, each of the fourth-page
size, 4 times, each of the eighth-page size, 8 times, and each of the
twelfth-page size, 12 times. The repetitions were cut from 12 copies
of the magazine number. The same advertisement never occurred on the
same page; every page, unless it was covered by a full-page
advertisement, offered a combination of various announcements.
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