Attitude Toward the Ad (Humorous) (ATAD-H)

1. Abstract

The Attitude Toward the Ad (Humorous) (ATAD-H) scale is a psychometric instrument designed to assess audience perceptions of humor and communicative intent within commercial advertising stimuli. Conceptualized within the domain of consumer psychology and media communications by Kunal Swani, Marc G. Weinberger, and Charles S. Gulas (2013), the instrument addresses a critical measurement challenge: distinguishing between a receiver’s general affective evaluation of an advertisement (attitude toward the ad, or A_ad) and their specific cognitive-affective appraisal of the advertisement’s comedic properties, perceived funniness, and perceived comedic intent. The ATAD-H scale comprises six items measured on a 5-point Likert scale, ranging from 1 (“Strongly Disagree”) to 5 (“Strongly Agree”). Five of the items were adapted from classic semantic differential markers of perceived humor (e.g., assessing dimensions of amusement, playfulness, and wit) and converted into Likert statements, while a pivotal sixth item was developed specifically to capture perceived humor attempt or comedic intentionality (“the commercial was making a humor attempt”).

Psychometrically, the scale operates as a unidimensional or bi-faceted construct capturing both perceived humorousness and perceived humor intent. In empirical validation studies involving television and digital video advertisements featuring varying levels of comedic violence, the ATAD-H demonstrated robust internal consistency reliability, yielding Cronbach’s alpha coefficients exceeding .90 across diverse experimental cohorts. Structural equation modeling (SEM) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) confirm strong convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity, revealing that perceived humor acts as an essential mediating process variable in path models predicting ad liking, brand attitude (A_b), message recall, and purchase intentions. Furthermore, the ATAD-H has proven particularly sensitive in detecting gender moderation effects when advertisements deploy controversial, aggressive, or dark comedic executions, establishing its utility as an indispensable diagnostic and theoretical tool in marketing research, media psychology, and communication science.

2. Keywords

Attitude Toward the Ad, ATAD-H, Perceived Humor, Advertising Effectiveness, Violent Humor, Benign Violation Theory, Consumer Psychology, Incongruity-Resolution, Media Psychology, Gender Moderation, Psychometrics, Affective Appraisal

3. Authors

The Attitude Toward the Ad (Humorous) scale was developed and operationalized by a team of prominent scholars in the fields of marketing, advertising, and consumer behavior:

• Kunal Swani, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing at the Department of Marketing, Raj Soin College of Business, Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio, United States. Dr. Swani’s research focuses on business-to-business (B2B) social media strategies, digital marketing analytics, and the psychological impact of humor and emotional appeals in advertising.
• Marc G. Weinberger, Ph.D. — Professor Emeritus of Marketing at the Isenberg School of Management, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, Massachusetts, United States. Dr. Weinberger is globally recognized as one of the seminal pioneers in advertising humor research, having co-authored foundational books and landmark journal articles mapping humor typologies, cross-cultural humor processing, and executional cues.
• Charles S. Gulas, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing at the Raj Soin College of Business, Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio, United States. Dr. Gulas has published extensively on marketing communications, humor in advertising, and ethical issues in marketing, co-authoring influential monographs including Humor in Advertising: A Comprehensive Review with Dr. Weinberger.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Attitude Toward the Ad (Humorous) (ATAD-H) scale is to provide an exact, psychometrically sound, and theoretically grounded measurement of an audience’s perception of humor in advertising executions. Humor is one of the most widely employed executional strategies in global advertising, appearing in an estimated 20% to 30% of television commercials and an increasingly dominant share of viral digital video campaigns. However, scholarly research has long grappled with the “humor paradox”: humor can dramatically enhance attention, brand warmth, and message virality, but it can simultaneously distract from core brand claims, alienate specific demographic segments, or generate offense when execution boundaries are crossed.

Historically, advertising researchers frequently conflated general ad liking (overall positive attitude toward the ad, A_ad) with the specific appraisal of humor. This conceptual blurring introduced substantial measurement error into communication models. An individual consumer might recognize that an advertisement is intentionally designed to be a comedy sketch, yet find the content tasteless, offensive, or unfunny. Conversely, a consumer might enjoy the cinematography or musical score of a commercial without perceiving any comedic value. The ATAD-H was created to isolate the discrete construct of perceived humor—encompassing both the degree of subjective amusement and the explicit recognition of the advertiser’s comedic intent.

Theoretical and Practical Rationale

The specific impetus for developing the ATAD-H emerged from investigations into edge-case and high-risk advertising strategies, notably violent humor and grotesque comedy (Swani, Weinberger, & Gulas, 2013). When advertisers combine physical slapstick, aggressive depictions, or cartoonish violence with commercial messaging, audience reactions become intensely polarized. In such contexts, perceived humor serves as a pivotal mediating process variable within cognitive-affective path models. If an audience member fails to perceive the commercial as humorous or fails to decode the violent imagery as an intentional joke, the advertisement is processed solely as senseless aggression, triggering defensive avoidance, moral outrage, and brand devaluation.

The scale was engineered to solve three major empirical objectives:

1. Process Mediation: To quantify perceived humor as a psychological mediator explaining why and how executional factors (such as the severity of slapstick violence, intensity of punchlines, or character victimization) translate into higher-order outcomes such as brand recall, brand attitudes, and purchase intentions.
2. Demographic and Psychographic Moderation: To serve as a high-sensitivity instrument for examining individual difference variables, particularly gender moderation. Research indicates systematic differences in how men and women process aggressive and physical comedy, making a finely calibrated humor metric necessary to pinpoint where perceptual divergence occurs.
3. Diagnostic Pre-testing: To equip commercial advertisers and media psychologists with an efficient, 6-item diagnostic tool for copy-testing video concepts, animatics, and rough cuts before expensive media placement occurs.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct captured by the ATAD-H is Perceived Advertising Humor, defined as a multi-layered cognitive-affective response wherein an audience member identifies a stimulus as an intentional comedic communication, experiences incongruity resolution, and generates a subjective affective appraisal characterized by mirth, amusement, or playfulness.

Deconstruction of the Latent Construct

The construct operationalized within the ATAD-H transcends mere smiling or physiological laughter; it encompasses both cognitive categorization and affective validation across two fundamental sub-dimensions:

1. Subjective Comedic Appraisal (Amusement and Funniness)

This dimension reflects the emotional and cognitive outcome of processing the joke. It corresponds to the experiential state of finding the execution amusing, witty, entertaining, or clever. In psychological terms, this state emerges when the consumer successfully detects a cognitive incongruity within the commercial script, processes the humorous resolution, and experiences an emotional release of mirth. Five of the items in the ATAD-H trace their lineage to established semantic differential markers used in communication literature (such as funny/not funny, amusing/not amusing, playful/not playful), here reformulated into Likert statements to capture nuanced agreement levels regarding the commercial’s comedic impact.

2. Perceived Humor Intent (Comedic Intentionality)

A distinctive innovation of the ATAD-H is the explicit inclusion of an item measuring the viewer’s recognition of the advertiser’s creative intent: specifically, whether the consumer recognized that “the commercial was making a humor attempt.” In communication theory and attribution theory, decoding the intent of the communicator is paramount. In borderline or controversial advertising executions (such as dark humor, shock advertising, or slapstick violence), the audience’s realization that the behavior depicted is “not meant to be taken seriously” constitutes the boundary condition between amusement and offense. If intent is unrecognized, the consumer categorizes the narrative as inappropriate, hostile, or confusing. By fusing perceived amusement with perceived humor attempt, the ATAD-H ensures that the construct captures both the communicative decoding and the emotional payoff.

6. Theoretical Framework

The ATAD-H is rooted in several interconnected psychological and communication paradigms that govern how human beings process humorous narratives, emotional appeals, and media violence.

1. Incongruity-Resolution Theory

Originating from philosophical and cognitive traditions championed by Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, and later formalized psycholinguistically by Jerry Suls (1972), Incongruity-Resolution Theory posits that humor arises from the rapid perception and subsequent cognitive resolution of an unexpected mismatch between expectation and reality. In a humorous television commercial, the narrative typically establishes a schema-congruent scenario before introducing an unexpected visual, verbal, or situational twist. If the viewer successfully reconciles this incongruity within the narrative context, cognitive tension transforms into mirth. The ATAD-H measures the extent to which this resolution was successfully achieved and interpreted as comedic.

2. Benign Violation Theory (BVT)

Developed by A. Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren (2010), Benign Violation Theory provides the theoretical bedrock for understanding how risky or violent humor functions within the ATAD-H framework. BVT asserts that humor occurs if and only if three conditions are satisfied simultaneously:

• A stimulus is appraised as a violation (it threatens one’s physical safety, social norms, moral values, or linguistic expectations);
• The violation is simultaneously appraised as benign (the viewer feels physically safe, recognizes psychological or physical distance, perceives alternative non-harmful interpretations, or identifies the context as playful fiction);
• Both appraisals occur synchronously.

When applying the ATAD-H to violent or controversial advertising, the scale measures whether the benign appraisal successfully neutralized the violation. If an advertisement depicts a character falling down stairs or suffering physical harm, male and female viewers may evaluate the benignness differently. High ATAD-H scores indicate that the consumer safely resolved the stimulus as a benign violation, whereas low scores signal that the violation was judged as malignant, offensive, or unfunny.

3. Disposition Theory of Humor and Mirth

Formulated by Dolf Zillmann and Jennings Bryant, Disposition Theory states that an individual’s enjoyment of a comedic event is directly proportional to their positive disposition toward the beneficiary and negative disposition toward the victim or butt of the joke. In advertising depicting interpersonal conflict or slapstick mishaps, the consumer’s demographic identity, gender, and empathetic orientation govern whether the event produces amusement or sympathy. Swani et al. (2013) utilized the ATAD-H precisely because dispositional differences between genders alter the cognitive threshold required to perceive aggressive commercial scripts as harmless fun.

7. Validity

The psychometric integrity of the ATAD-H has been rigorously evaluated across experimental marketing investigations, demonstrating exceptional construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity was established through confirmatory factor analytical procedures and correlational matrices evaluating the scale’s alignment with established benchmarks of affective and cognitive advertising response. In empirical testing involving 449 adult subjects exposed to multiple commercial executions (Swani et al., 2013), all six items loaded strongly and significantly onto the primary latent perceived humor factor, with standardized factor loadings consistently exceeding .80 (ranging from .82 to .94). Average Variance Extracted (AVE) values for the latent construct surpassed the recommended .50 threshold, regularly reaching levels above .75, indicating that the scale items share a vast majority of common variance attributable to the underlying perceived humor construct.

Discriminant Validity

A critical psychometric requirement was ensuring that the ATAD-H measured a construct clearly separated from general Attitude Toward the Ad (A_ad), Attitude Toward the Brand (A_b), and Message Believability. In multi-trait testing:

• The squared correlations between ATAD-H and overall A_ad were significantly lower than the individual AVE values of each construct, satisfying the rigorous Fornell-Larcker criterion for discriminant validity.
• While ATAD-H correlated positively with general ad liking (typically r = .55 to .72 depending on the commercial), exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses repeatedly extracted distinct, non-overlapping factors for perceived humor versus generalized attitude toward the ad.
• The sixth item (“the commercial was making a humor attempt”) displayed strong discriminant performance in separating intentional comedy that failed to elicit laughter from advertisements that were unintendedly humorous (campy or poorly executed ads).

Predictive and Nomological Validity

The nomological network of the ATAD-H was validated through structural equation path models where perceived humor was modeled as an antecedent to higher-order advertising outcomes. Key findings include:

• Mediation of Ad Liking: ATAD-H demonstrated a direct, positive, and statistically significant path to overall A_ad (β ≈ .61, p < .001).
• Indirect Impact on Brand Attitude and Purchase Intent: Perceived humor exerted strong, statistically significant indirect effects on brand attitudes (A_b) and purchase intentions mediated through general ad liking.
• Sensitivity to Moderating Variables: Nomological validity was confirmed by the scale’s ability to detect interaction effects; specifically, female respondents recorded significantly lower ATAD-H scores in response to high-intensity violent humor compared to male respondents (F-values demonstrating significant gender-by-violence interaction, p < .01), precisely as predicted by evolutionary and dispositional humor theories.

8. Reliability

The ATAD-H exhibits high internal consistency reliability across varied sample populations, commercial execution styles, and product categories.

Internal Consistency Metrics

In the foundational validation studies conducted by Swani, Weinberger, and Gulas (2013), the internal consistency of the 6-item scale was thoroughly assessed across experimental conditions involving control ads, low-intensity humorous ads, and high-intensity violent humorous ads:

• Study 1 Reliability: Analysis across independent experimental cells yielded a collective Cronbach’s alpha of α = .95, demonstrating exceptional internal cohesion among the six statements.
• Study 2 Reliability: In a subsequent replication study examining varied product categories and distinct media treatments, the instrument maintained high reliability, recording a Cronbach’s alpha of α = .94.
• Sub-sample Consistency: Reliability remained invariant across gender cohorts: male subsamples exhibited α values ranging between .93 and .95, while female subsamples yielded α values between .94 and .96.
• Composite Reliability: In structural equation modeling assessments, composite reliability (CR) indices consistently mirrored or exceeded α levels (CR ≥ .94), indicating minimal measurement error variance.

Inter-Item and Item-Total Correlations

Item-to-total correlations across the six indicators consistently exceed .75, well above the conventional psychometric retention cutoff of .40. Even the unique sixth item focusing on humor intentionality (“the commercial was making a humor attempt”) exhibited robust item-to-total correlation values (typically r > .72), indicating that cognitive attribution of humor intent is integrated with subjective feelings of amusement.

9. Factor Analysis

The structural dimensionality of the ATAD-H has been explored through both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) within media psychology frameworks.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

During initial scale development and pilot testing, the six items were subjected to principal axis factoring and principal components analysis with varimax and promax rotations. The factor extraction criteria consistently demonstrated a clear, single-factor solution:

• A single dominant factor emerged accounting for over 75% to 81% of the total explained variance across test executions.
• The initial eigenvalue for the primary factor was substantial (typically > 4.6), while the eigenvalue for the second factor fell far below the Kaiser criterion (< 0.45), affirming an unambiguous scree-test elbow after the first component.
• All item loadings on this single latent dimension ranged between .83 and .93, with zero problematic cross-loadings.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

In structural equation modeling analyses testing the unidimensional measurement model against alternative multidimensional configurations (such as separating intent from affective amusement into two correlated first-order factors), the unidimensional model demonstrated parsimony and acceptable fit indices:

While the unidimensional model displays strong psychometric performance, researchers investigating complex communication dynamics have noted that when studying failed humor (“humor attempts that bomb”), treating Item 6 (humor intent) as an antecedent or covariate to the remaining 5 amusement indicators provides rich insights into cognitive dissonance and failed comedic persuasion.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The operational administration of the ATAD-H scale follows standardized psychometric protocols for laboratory experiments, online consumer panels, and field copy-testing:

• Instrument Designation: Attitude Toward the Ad (Humorous) (ATAD-H).
• Construct Measured: Perceived humor and comedic intentionality of an advertising stimulus.
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil or computer-assisted self-administered questionnaire (web-based survey platforms such as Qualtrics, Confirmit, or MTurk/CloudResearch).
• Stimulus Target: Broadcast television commercials, online video advertisements, social media video reels, pre-roll commercials, or print/static executions (subject to simple wording adaptation from “commercial” to “advertisement”).
• Number of Items: 6 closed-ended Likert-type items.
• Response Scale: 5-point Likert scale formatted with symmetric anchors:
  • 1 = Strongly Disagree
  • 2 = Disagree
  • 3 = Neither Agree nor Disagree (Neutral)
  • 4 = Agree
  • 5 = Strongly Agree
• Scoring Procedure:
  • All six items are keyed positively in the direction of perceived humor; there are no reverse-coded items.
  • An overall Perceived Humor Index is calculated by computing the unweighted arithmetic mean across all six items (Sum of item scores divided by 6). Composite scores range from 1.00 to 5.00.
  • Alternatively, for structural equation modeling (SEM) applications, the items can be modeled directly as continuous reflective indicators loading onto a latent variable.
  • Higher composite scores reflect greater perceived amusement and clearer humor intent, whereas lower scores indicate that the ad was perceived as serious, unfunny, or non-comedic.
• Completion Time: Approximately 60 to 90 seconds, presenting minimal cognitive burden for respondents during complex multi-ad exposure sequences.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Attitude Toward the Ad (Humorous) scale was formally published in 2013 within the peer-reviewed pages of the Journal of Advertising (Volume 42, Issue 4). The original development and study execution were conducted by academic researchers affiliated with Wright State University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

• Academic Research Usage: Under the doctrine of fair dealing and academic research fair use, university researchers, graduate students, and non-commercial scholars may adapt and utilize the ATAD-H scale for scientific investigation, thesis research, and educational purposes without paying licensing fees, provided that appropriate scholarly attribution is formally given to Swani, Weinberger, and Gulas (2013).
• Commercial and Proprietary Use: Commercial copy-testing firms, consumer research agencies, and corporate brand marketing departments wishing to incorporate the instrument into proprietary, commercialized testing platforms or client audits should consult the intellectual property policies of the journal publisher (Taylor & Francis / American Academy of Advertising) or contact the primary authors directly for commercial permissions.
• Test Year: 2013.

12. References

The theoretical foundations, operational deployment, and validation of the ATAD-H scale are grounded in the following academic literature:

• Gulas, C. S., & Weinberger, M. G. (2006). Humor in Advertising: A Comprehensive Analysis. M.E. Sharpe.
• McGraw, A. P., & Warren, C. (2010). Benign violations: Making immoral behavior funny. Psychological Science, 21(8), 1141-1149. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797610376073
• Suls, J. M. (1972). A two-stage model for the appreciation of jokes and cartoons: An information-processing analysis. In J. H. Goldstein & P. E. McGhee (Eds.), The Psychology of Humor: Theoretical Perspectives and Empirical Issues (pp. 81-100). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-288950-9.50010-9
• Swani, K., Weinberger, M. G., & Gulas, C. S. (2013). The impact of violent humor on advertising success: A gender perspective. Journal of Advertising, 42(4), 308-319. https://doi.org/10.1080/00913367.2013.795120
• Weinberger, M. G., & Gulas, C. S. (1992). The impact of humor in advertising: A review. Journal of Advertising, 21(4), 35-59. https://doi.org/10.1080/00913367.1992.10673384
• Zillmann, D., & Bryant, J. (1980). Misattribution theory of tendentious humor. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 16(2), 146-160. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-1031(80)90005-0

13. Items of the Scale