How songs from growing up and viewers' attachment styles affect video ads' effectiveness

Abstract

We propose that the positive effect of coming-of-age songs on ad effectiveness arises from a mediation process where the music-evoked interpersonal memories of growing up stored in the brain and their accompanying emotions inevitably play a role, but not so straightforwardly as previously suggested. Rather, their effects work through the heightened familiarity of and peaked preferences for coming-of-age songs. We also propose that these sequentially mediated effects are moderated by viewers' developmental attachment styles. We test and find support for these propositions in three multimethod studies with more than 1200 participants born between the 40s and the mid-70s and almost 60 popular songs released between the 60s and the 2010s. We discuss the implications of our findings, namely for age-segmented video ads, and suggest future research directions.