Effects of strategy and pictures in travel agency advertising

This study explores the effectiveness of various types of print advertising as a promo-tional vehicle, focusing on the main message strategy, the presence or absence of pictures, and the specific nature of the picture. The results show that informational advertising elicits a more favorable response pattern than image-based (or transformational) advertising. However, the picture effect is more pronounced for the informational ad, although the nature of the picture is less important. Recommendations are that smaller travel agencies empha-size informational advertising accompanied by pictures and that larger agencies continue to use pictures but strengthen the informational component of their advertising copy. Newspapers are the dominant medium for travel agency advertising today. Even a cursory look at the Sunday travel section of any major metropolitan newspaper will reveal two prototypical travel agency ads: (1) image-based, usually incor-porating pictures, and (2) information-based, typically verbal in nature. Weaver and McCleary (1984) determined that the dominant image-based format consisted of a male an