text:
When Does Consumer Information Processing Research Actually Have Anything to Do With Consumer Information Processing?
ABSTRACT - Consumer information processing (CIP) research relates to consumer information processing if the situation in the research is the same as the situation in the processing. This paper concentrates on what may be the most common CIP or persuasion situation, that of advertising. The advertising situation differs from the typical CIP research one in audience involvement, attention, noise, exposure time and audience control of exposure. In general, motivation and opportunity to make cognitive responses and use attitude structures is lacking in advertising persuasion and heightened in CIP-persuasion research. Several examples are given of the results of this dramatic difference, and researchers are cautioned to take care in applying results from highly artificial to natural situations. In the future CIP researchers should extend their theories and initial findings to settings like the advertising one.
Michael L. Ray (1977) ,"When Does Consumer Information Processing Research Actually Have Anything to Do With Consumer Information Processing?", in NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 04, eds. William D. Perreault, Jr., Atlanta, GA : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 372-375.
Consumer information processing (CIP) research relates to consumer information processing if the situation in the research is the same as the situation in the processing. This paper concentrates on what may be the most common CIP or persuasion situation, that of advertising. The advertising situation differs from the typical CIP research one in audience involvement, attention, noise, exposure time and audience control of exposure. In general, motivation and opportunity to make cognitive responses and use attitude structures is lacking in advertising persuasion and heightened in CIP-persuasion research. Several examples are given of the results of this dramatic difference, and researchers are cautioned to take care in applying results from highly artificial to natural situations. In the future CIP researchers should extend their theories and initial findings to settings like the advertising one.
My answer to the question "When does consumer information processing research actually have anything to do with consumer information processing?" is, in general, "Sometimes." More specifically, I believe that the majority of persuasion situations involve mass media advertising which is almost always different, in at least six ways, from the artificial conditions of CIP research.
1. Advertising is a low involvement situation while the CIP research setting is a high involvement one. People don't care about the ads. They are far from as motivated to process information as are the experimental "subjects" in CIP labs.
2. In advertising attention is difficult to achieve while in CIP research attention is forced in virtually all cases.
3. In advertising there is, in an information theory sense (Shannon and Weaver, 1949), much noise (consisting of competing messages, etc.) while CIP re- search is usually conducted in a sterile environment in order to create "experimental realism" (Aronson and Carlsmith, 1968).
4. Advertising, particularly broadcast, involves short exposure time while CIP research averages much longer exposure time and time to consider messages.
5. For advertising the audience has little or no control of exposure time. In CIP research the audience often has control over exposure time.
6. So in the advertising situation there is minimal motivation or opportunity to develop cognitive responses or use attitude structures. But in consumer information processing or persuasion research the situation is engineered to produce cognitive responses and use of attitude structures.
In short, the most typical persuasion situation in the world is one that is ignored by the bulk of the social psychological research on persuasion.
At the same time, however, consumer information processing research--including the cognitive response analysis and cognitive attitude structure analysis approaches we are concentrating on today as well as the perceptual mapping-conjoint measurement approaches and hierarchy of effects analysis research--seems to me to hold the key to understanding this most common persuasion and, therefore, consumer information processing situation. This is because consumer information processing researchers are truly concerned with people and the way they handle the very difficult task of using tremendous amounts of information to make very complex decisions under very difficult conditions. No longer are we content to consider audiences en masse almost mindlessly stepping through the stages of cognition, affect, and conation. So despite the fact that most of the initial research in this area has concentrated on rather unrealistic conditions, it has been and will lead to rather clear implications for campaign planners attempting to deal with the consumer information processing situation represented by advertising.
The point I'm making is not really too different from Hovland's (1959) in his classic paper published seventeen years ago and entitled "Reconciling Conflicting Results Derived from Experimental and Survey Studies of Attitude Change." The importance of situational characteristics was established well throughout all of the Hovland communication and attitude change studies. This tradition is represented recently by our discussant Timothy Brock's (Keating and Brock, 1971; Osterhouse and Brock, 1970) cautions that the distraction technique will only work when people are involved and antagonistic to the message position and when distraction does not impede learning. And this session's chairman has made a very valuable contribution by pointing out how situational constraints can affect the choice or aggregation model a consumer might use (Wright, 1974).
But today I would like to go a bit further than just cautioning about the effects of the situation. I would like to suggest that consumer information processing researchers attempting to deal with persuasion processes must begin to realize that there is more than a quantitative difference between persuasion in their laboratory studies and persuasion in the real world of advertising. In fact the difference is qualitative. Today I would like to give a number of examples of the unusual results one can get when there is an attempt to bring "mundane realism" (Aronson and Carlsmith, 1968) into persuasion research. My main point is that by concentrating on the differences between information processing and persuasion situations we can begin to make "translations" from CIP research to advertising applications. And, in the future we can begin to bring a wider variety of persuasion situations into CIP research.
The results in this paper come primarily from a program of research at Stanford in which we have tried to replicate natural exposure situations in controlled laboratory experimentation so that the findings of communication research could be examined in a more realistic way. In virtually all the studies repetition is an independent variable so that the procedure used resembles the free recall paradigm of verbal learning research, with the exception that the stimuli are advertisements rather than nonsense syllables.
When we began the research we assumed a hierarchy relationship between learning, attitude and behavior that would be predicted from the rtl-component notion of attitude or most learning or information processing formulations. We are surprised to find, however, that for most of our results a different pattern emerged. This was the pattern predicted by Krugman's (1965) notions about the process of television advertising effects. In this "low involvement" hierarchy, repetitive messages worked to affect gross brand and advertising awareness and subsequently had a slight effect on purchase intention but little effect on attitude.
Later we realized that a third hierarchy was possible under other conditions. In this one, which we called the "dissonance-attribution hierarchy," a choice had been made before advertising exposures and combined with the exposures to affect attitude first and finally complex cognitive learning.
These three hierarchies--learning (cognitive to affective to conative), low involvement (cognitive to conative to affective), and dissonance-attribution (conative to affective to cognitive)--were more fully described in a 1973 paper which was a collaborative effort of the Stanford researchers (Ray et al., (1973). Two aspects of the findings are critical for the present purposes however. First, each of the three hierarchies represents a large body of social psychological research on particular situations which are well defined. Knowing about the hierarchies and what causes them allows a very functional analysis of situations to determine how consumers will process information in them.
The second conclusion that might be made from the Stanford repetition and hierarchy research is that the majority of situations in advertising, particularly that for the broadcast media, tend to be low involvement ones. That is, the decisions being made are not salient or important, there are almost no differences between alternative brands and products, advertising is the main source of information, and consumers are very familiar with the product category in the sense that it is in the maturity stage of its life cycle.
If this is an accurate description of most advertising persuasion situations, we have great reason to question the applicability of most information processing research. Certainly the likelihood of detailed cognitive response in such a situation is Low. At best it may be that cognitive response operates in some very different way. Also, since there are few product differences and the decisions are not salient to people, it isn't likely that multi-attribute attitude structures hold or that the more textured choice models apply to the use of advertising information.
At the most basic level, the low involvement situation means a limit in information processing. Even with the tremendous repetition potential of advertising, researchers have found that there is a definite limit to what people get out of messages. For instance, Krugman (1972) expanded his low involvement idea by surmising that there are really only three relevant exposures in a number of repetitions of television advertising. The first one produces a "what is it?" response. The second one produces whatever information processing is going to occur, and the third exposure and all subsequent ones are equivalent to reminders of whatever was learned in the second exposure.
Once again, there is much in the Stanford repetition research data that supports Krugman's idea. Although cognitive learning curves did not stop automatically at the three exposure level, there did seem to be some very low level of exposure at which point nothing further was taken out of a message exposed in the television manner. Further repetitions just reinforced the basic message. Even when there might be some involvement in the situation, consumers definitely have developed particular ways of using advertising. For instance, in one study comparing the repetition effect of advertising for convenience goods and shopping goods, it was found that the repetition response function for ad recall went up steadily for convenience goods but stopped after four exposures for the shopping goods advertisements (Ray and Sawyer, 1971). Our interpretation for that finding was that consumers did not use ads for shopping goods (e.g., washing machines, television sets, and low price cars) to gather any more than the most basic information. The important information gathering phase for shopping goods was in the store actually examining the product and discussing it with salespeople. Thus repetitions of the ads had an effect only up to a certain point.
The same kind of limit to what consumers will process was found in a study of color versus B&W advertisements (Ray, Sawyer and Strong, 1971). In this study we examined the repetition results for two series of ads which were identical except that one series had one color added to the pictures of fruits or vegetables depicted. The color ads were superior in getting the message recalled, but the black and white ads, if recalled, were superior in generating learning of the main message. In a follow-up field experiment using the two ad series, the black and white print ads were more effective than the color in producing ad awareness. It seemed that, in this real advertising situation, the black and white ads generated more information processing while the color ads elicited just a surface awareness after a certain point, no matter what the repetition level.
All of these examples--evidence of the low involvement hierarchy, the limit to information processing in advertising situations and the specific cases of that limit--show what can happen to cherished CIP folklore in the real advertising situation.
As I have already pointed out, one of the key differences between most lab persuasion studies and the typical advertising situation is that attention is a given in the labs but a goal hard to attain in advertising. Our original assessment of this bias was that it was a main effect, that is, if an ad or message did well in the lab it would do relatively well in the field--pro-vided it had the appropriate schedule.
Now we are beginning to believe that there is not only a greater main effect difference than we had originally presumed but also there are interactions. That is, ads that do well in a forced exposure lab situation may be the very ones that do poorly in the field.
My evidence for this comes from a series of lab studies on television clutter carried out by Peter Webb (Ray and Webb, 1976, Webb and Ray, 1977). Peter first determined that his lab approach was producing attention patterns similar to that found in field research (e.g., Burke, 1972). Once this was established he was able to manipulate the commercial break pattern in several television program types.
His main finding was that consumers don't just randomly ignore commercials. They seem to actually avoid them--and with considerable skill at that.
Consumers were amazingly well-schooled as to the pattern of commercial breaks on their favorite programs. This was particularly true for soap operas. When Peter tried different commercial schedules during those programs than the schedules to which consumers were accustomed, they very often asked why this unusual pattern was being used. During debriefing respondents told us more about how carefully they watched for the pattern of commercial interruptions. For instance, one working woman actually made an audio tape of soap operas so that she could plan her housework during the commercial breaks while she was home having lunch and watching her program.
The data supported the patterning beyond such anecdotal evidence, however. Even those respondents who made no visual or verbal indication of noting an unusual pattern were able to avoid being affected by the most common interruption schedule for the program. In other words, virtually all response measures were lower for the most common type of interruption schedule as opposed to the more unusual ones.
Before this research we had assumed that the typical laboratory information processing of communication research studies erred in forcing people to read or view the messages while in a more natural situation consumers would not be biased toward or away from viewing the messages. NOW this research indicates that the error of typical laboratory communication research studies may be even greater than we had previously imagined. While the lab studies bias people toward viewing the material, the audience/in the natural situation may have learned to be biased completely in the other direction, that is, away from viewing and processing the messages. In advertising we have to be concerned not just with getting attention. We have to gain attention from people who are actively avoiding us.
Given this bias, however, is it possible that certain commercials--which may not do well in typical persuasion research--might be less susceptible to the vagaries of clutter and consumer avoidance? Peter Webb examined the extent to which involvement would enhance message effectiveness. He used the "connections" measure developed by Krugman (1966-67). As hypothesized, those commercials shown to be high in involvement in a prestudy seemed unaffected by changes in clutter (4 versus 8 commercials) or position in a string of commercials, while low involvement commercials were dramatically effected.
Even further we found that commercials which would not do well in typical persuasion research did well in a normal exposure situation, possibly because they generated involvement and attention.
More specifically we showed, at least in one case, that counterarguing can enhance persuasion.
In CIP and lab persuasion studies in which the respondents are forced to be exposed to the messages, counter-arguing is a negative to be avoided at all cost. But when exposure conditions are more realistic and attention is an important goal, counterarguing can sometimes enhance persuasion by increasing attention and making the message more memorable.
In an NIMH-sponsored study on the effects of anti-drug abuse messages, we found exactly that effect of counter-arguing (Ray, Ward and Reed, 1976). We studied, among others, two commercials which had quite opposite patterns of cognitive response. "Walkout" was a memorable commercial which produced nearly violent counterarguing from the parents audience. "Big Brother" was not quite as memorable but produced positive cognitive responses such as "connections." In natural lab experiments and in a split cable field experiment the Walkout commercial was substantially more effective than the Big Brother commercial in producing, for instance, positive attitude change, booklet interest and reported numbers of times that respondents thought, read about, and talked about drug abuse during the time the commercials were running.
In this case, as in many situations in the real world, some response was better than no response at all. In such situations the counterarguing so worrisome to information processing researchers, can be a benefit.
Thus, with regard to attention, the advertising situation is more difficult than we expected and involving commercials surmounted the difficulty somewhat, even when they were the opposite of those that do well in the typical lab study.
The results I've discussed thus far indicate that we must take great care in translating CIP and persuasion lab research to the field in terms of advertising. In many cases lab and field results will be markedly different. Not only should we apply lab results carefully but we should start to alter our research procedures to take account of the nature of the advertising situation.
But there is another approach that might be taken and is illustrated by my final example. Instead of trying to translate to advertising, we can ignore it, and--like the drunk looking for his lost keys under the street light--we cam look for situations in the real world that are similar to those in the lab.
This was and is the approach used by many applied persuasion researchers in the late 60's and in the 70's. For instance, on our campus, Philip Zimbardo trained hundreds of Stanford students--on one occasion in a mass rally--to use social psychological principles in canvassing for peace candidates and issues in 1970. This led to a little booklet entitled Canvassing for Peace which Zimbardo wrote with Robert Abelson (1970). A more general statement of this approach is in the Zimbardo and Ebbesen paperback Influencing Attitudes and Changing Behavior (1969) and in Varela (1971). In consumer research and application it is represented by those who see the most direct applications in personal selling or at the very least in print advertising, usually in an industrial or public service setting--where there might be involvement and the type of processing found in the lab.
Even in such set-up situations, however, I would argue that we need to take great care in application.
For our example here, I'll use the "foot-in-the door" technique. The seminal foot-in-the-door study was conducted by Freedman and Fraser (1966), who asked residents to place a small card in their window. Two weeks later these residents were asked to display a large, clumsily lettered sign. Subjects who had been approached to comply with the earlier request were much more likely to agree with the second one.
Although the foot-in-the-door or small request approach has been found to be quite effective in the social psychological literature, one field experiment done by William Swinyard demonstrated a situation in which adding a small request to a sales message actually decreased the combined effect of the sales message and later advertising exposures (Swinyard and Ray 1976, 1977).
The key response was intention to volunteer for Red Cross work and the small requests were to put a little sign in the prospect's window and wear a Red Cross pin for at least two shopping trips. Both in terms of main effect and interaction with advertising exposures, the small request manipulation was less effective than a persuasive message without the small request. Again, the explanation appears to be related quite directly to the situation. The Red Cross is an issue about which respondents may feel a good deal of guilt. They "know" that they should give blood or volunteer, yet they are fearful or don't want to take the time. They look for simple ways to relieve the guilt and still avoid the anxiety brought on by the needle and the inconvenience of time demands. Compliance with the small request may have provided an easy way for respondents to relieve this guilt, bringing with it a feeling that, "I have made my 'contribution' already...I don't need to do any more.".
Whether you agree with this explanation or not, you should know that ours is not the only research that found the small request manipulation lacking in social marketing situations. Alice Tybout (1976) found that a small request manipulation worked only when the commitment was made salient to respondents. This obviously fits the concern in this paper with the differential involvement found in persuasion research and in the field.
In conclusion, I believe I have an answer to the question that started this paper. Consumer information processing research relates to consumer information processing if the situation in the research is the same as the situation in the processing. Practitioners can use our findings if they are very careful to determine whether there is a match between the situation in the research and the situation in which real world processing takes place. At this point I perceive a difference between the situation in most research and that in the most common persuasion category, advertising Most advertising, especially the broadcast kind, represents a low involvement situation. But it is possible to take even present research findings and analyze their implications for advertising. And fortunately the trend in information processing research seems to be toward more natural exposure and response conditions.
Robert P. Abelson and Philip Zimbardo, Canvassing for Peace (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, 1970).
Burke Marketing Research, Inc. "Viewer Attitudes Toward Commercial Clutter on Television and Media Buying Implications,'' Presentation to 18th ARF Conference (November 14, 1972).
Jonathan L. Freedman and S. C. Fraser, "Compliance Without Pressure: The Foot-in-the-Door Technique," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4 (March 1966), 195-202.
Carl I. Hovland, "Reconciling Conflicting Results Derived from Experimental and Survey Studies of Attitude Change," American Psychologist, 14 (January 1959), 8-17.
J. P. Keating and Timothy C. Brock, "A Myth About Distraction," American Scientist, 59 (December 1971), 416-9.
Robert A. Osterhouse and Timothy C. Brock, "Distraction Increases Yielding to Propaganda by Inhibition Counterarguing," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 15 (August 1970), 344-58.
Michael L. Ray and Alan G. Sawyer, "Repetition in Media Models: A Laboratory Technique," Journal of Marketing Research, 8 (February 1971), 20-30.
Michael L. Ray in collaboration with Alan G. Sawyer, Michael L. Rothschild, Roger M. Heeler, Edward C. Strong, and Jerome B. Reed, "Marketing Communication and the Hierarchy-of-Effects," in Peter Clarke (Ed.), New Models for Mass Communication Research, Beverly Hills, California: Sage Publications, 1973).
Michael L. Ray, Alan G. Sawyer and Edward C. Strong, "Frequency Effects Revisited," Journal of Advertising Research, 11 (February 1971), 14-20.
Michael L. Ray, Scott Ward and Jerome B. Reed, "Pretesting of Anti-Drug Abuse Education and Information Campaigns: Summary Report of a Marketing Science Institute Special Project," in Ronald E. Ostman (Ed.) Communication Research and Drug Education (Beverly Hills, California: Sage Publications, 1976).
Michael L. Ray and Peter Webb, "Experimental Research on the Effects of TV Clutter: Dealing With the Difficult Media Environment," Report No. 76-102, Marketing Science Institute, Cambridge, Massachusetts (April 1976).
Claude E. Shannon and W. Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949).
William R. Swinyard, "Advertising-Selling Interactions," Journal of Marketing Research, 14 (1977).
Alice M. Tybout and Bobby J. Calder, "Threats to Internal and External Validity in the Field Setting," in William D. Perreault, Jr. (Ed.) Advances in Consumer Research, Vol. IV, (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Association for Consumer Research, 1977).
Jacobo A. Varela, Psychological Solutions to Social Problems: An Introduction to Social Technology (New York: Academic Press, 1971).
Peter Webb and Michael L. Ray, "Experimental Research on the Effects of TV Clutter," Advertising Quarterly (1977).
Peter L. Wright, "The Harassed Decision Maker: Time Pressures, Distractions, and the Use of Evidence," Journal of Applied Psychology, 59 (1974).
Philip Zimbardo and Ebbe Ebbesen, Influencing Attitudes and Changing Behavior (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1969).

lowercased:
when does consumer information processing research actually have anything to do with consumer information processing?
abstract - consumer information processing (cip) research relates to consumer information processing if the situation in the research is the same as the situation in the processing. this paper concentrates on what may be the most common cip or persuasion situation, that of advertising. the advertising situation differs from the typical cip research one in audience involvement, attention, noise, exposure time and audience control of exposure. in general, motivation and opportunity to make cognitive responses and use attitude structures is lacking in advertising persuasion and heightened in cip-persuasion research. several examples are given of the results of this dramatic difference, and researchers are cautioned to take care in applying results from highly artificial to natural situations. in the future cip researchers should extend their theories and initial findings to settings like the advertising one.
michael l. ray (1977) ,"when does consumer information processing research actually have anything to do with consumer information processing?", in na - advances in consumer research volume 04, eds. william d. perreault, jr., atlanta, ga : association for consumer research, pages: 372-375.
consumer information processing (cip) research relates to consumer information processing if the situation in the research is the same as the situation in the processing. this paper concentrates on what may be the most common cip or persuasion situation, that of advertising. the advertising situation differs from the typical cip research one in audience involvement, attention, noise, exposure time and audience control of exposure. in general, motivation and opportunity to make cognitive responses and use attitude structures is lacking in advertising persuasion and heightened in cip-persuasion research. several examples are given of the results of this dramatic difference, and researchers are cautioned to take care in applying results from highly artificial to natural situations. in the future cip researchers should extend their theories and initial findings to settings like the advertising one.
my answer to the question "when does consumer information processing research actually have anything to do with consumer information processing?" is, in general, "sometimes." more specifically, i believe that the majority of persuasion situations involve mass media advertising which is almost always different, in at least six ways, from the artificial conditions of cip research.
1. advertising is a low involvement situation while the cip research setting is a high involvement one. people don't care about the ads. they are far from as motivated to process information as are the experimental "subjects" in cip labs.
2. in advertising attention is difficult to achieve while in cip research attention is forced in virtually all cases.
3. in advertising there is, in an information theory sense (shannon and weaver, 1949), much noise (consisting of competing messages, etc.) while cip re- search is usually conducted in a sterile environment in order to create "experimental realism" (aronson and carlsmith, 1968).
4. advertising, particularly broadcast, involves short exposure time while cip research averages much longer exposure time and time to consider messages.
5. for advertising the audience has little or no control of exposure time. in cip research the audience often has control over exposure time.
6. so in the advertising situation there is minimal motivation or opportunity to develop cognitive responses or use attitude structures. but in consumer information processing or persuasion research the situation is engineered to produce cognitive responses and use of attitude structures.
in short, the most typical persuasion situation in the world is one that is ignored by the bulk of the social psychological research on persuasion.
at the same time, however, consumer information processing research--including the cognitive response analysis and cognitive attitude structure analysis approaches we are concentrating on today as well as the perceptual mapping-conjoint measurement approaches and hierarchy of effects analysis research--seems to me to hold the key to understanding this most common persuasion and, therefore, consumer information processing situation. this is because consumer information processing researchers are truly concerned with people and the way they handle the very difficult task of using tremendous amounts of information to make very complex decisions under very difficult conditions. no longer are we content to consider audiences en masse almost mindlessly stepping through the stages of cognition, affect, and conation. so despite the fact that most of the initial research in this area has concentrated on rather unrealistic conditions, it has been and will lead to rather clear implications for campaign planners attempting to deal with the consumer information processing situation represented by advertising.
the point i'm making is not really too different from hovland's (1959) in his classic paper published seventeen years ago and entitled "reconciling conflicting results derived from experimental and survey studies of attitude change." the importance of situational characteristics was established well throughout all of the hovland communication and attitude change studies. this tradition is represented recently by our discussant timothy brock's (keating and brock, 1971; osterhouse and brock, 1970) cautions that the distraction technique will only work when people are involved and antagonistic to the message position and when distraction does not impede learning. and this session's chairman has made a very valuable contribution by pointing out how situational constraints can affect the choice or aggregation model a consumer might use (wright, 1974).
but today i would like to go a bit further than just cautioning about the effects of the situation. i would like to suggest that consumer information processing researchers attempting to deal with persuasion processes must begin to realize that there is more than a quantitative difference between persuasion in their laboratory studies and persuasion in the real world of advertising. in fact the difference is qualitative. today i would like to give a number of examples of the unusual results one can get when there is an attempt to bring "mundane realism" (aronson and carlsmith, 1968) into persuasion research. my main point is that by concentrating on the differences between information processing and persuasion situations we can begin to make "translations" from cip research to advertising applications. and, in the future we can begin to bring a wider variety of persuasion situations into cip research.
the results in this paper come primarily from a program of research at stanford in which we have tried to replicate natural exposure situations in controlled laboratory experimentation so that the findings of communication research could be examined in a more realistic way. in virtually all the studies repetition is an independent variable so that the procedure used resembles the free recall paradigm of verbal learning research, with the exception that the stimuli are advertisements rather than nonsense syllables.
when we began the research we assumed a hierarchy relationship between learning, attitude and behavior that would be predicted from the rtl-component notion of attitude or most learning or information processing formulations. we are surprised to find, however, that for most of our results a different pattern emerged. this was the pattern predicted by krugman's (1965) notions about the process of television advertising effects. in this "low involvement" hierarchy, repetitive messages worked to affect gross brand and advertising awareness and subsequently had a slight effect on purchase intention but little effect on attitude.
later we realized that a third hierarchy was possible under other conditions. in this one, which we called the "dissonance-attribution hierarchy," a choice had been made before advertising exposures and combined with the exposures to affect attitude first and finally complex cognitive learning.
these three hierarchies--learning (cognitive to affective to conative), low involvement (cognitive to conative to affective), and dissonance-attribution (conative to affective to cognitive)--were more fully described in a 1973 paper which was a collaborative effort of the stanford researchers (ray et al., (1973). two aspects of the findings are critical for the present purposes however. first, each of the three hierarchies represents a large body of social psychological research on particular situations which are well defined. knowing about the hierarchies and what causes them allows a very functional analysis of situations to determine how consumers will process information in them.
the second conclusion that might be made from the stanford repetition and hierarchy research is that the majority of situations in advertising, particularly that for the broadcast media, tend to be low involvement ones. that is, the decisions being made are not salient or important, there are almost no differences between alternative brands and products, advertising is the main source of information, and consumers are very familiar with the product category in the sense that it is in the maturity stage of its life cycle.
if this is an accurate description of most advertising persuasion situations, we have great reason to question the applicability of most information processing research. certainly the likelihood of detailed cognitive response in such a situation is low. at best it may be that cognitive response operates in some very different way. also, since there are few product differences and the decisions are not salient to people, it isn't likely that multi-attribute attitude structures hold or that the more textured choice models apply to the use of advertising information.
at the most basic level, the low involvement situation means a limit in information processing. even with the tremendous repetition potential of advertising, researchers have found that there is a definite limit to what people get out of messages. for instance, krugman (1972) expanded his low involvement idea by surmising that there are really only three relevant exposures in a number of repetitions of television advertising. the first one produces a "what is it?" response. the second one produces whatever information processing is going to occur, and the third exposure and all subsequent ones are equivalent to reminders of whatever was learned in the second exposure.
once again, there is much in the stanford repetition research data that supports krugman's idea. although cognitive learning curves did not stop automatically at the three exposure level, there did seem to be some very low level of exposure at which point nothing further was taken out of a message exposed in the television manner. further repetitions just reinforced the basic message. even when there might be some involvement in the situation, consumers definitely have developed particular ways of using advertising. for instance, in one study comparing the repetition effect of advertising for convenience goods and shopping goods, it was found that the repetition response function for ad recall went up steadily for convenience goods but stopped after four exposures for the shopping goods advertisements (ray and sawyer, 1971). our interpretation for that finding was that consumers did not use ads for shopping goods (e.g., washing machines, television sets, and low price cars) to gather any more than the most basic information. the important information gathering phase for shopping goods was in the store actually examining the product and discussing it with salespeople. thus repetitions of the ads had an effect only up to a certain point.
the same kind of limit to what consumers will process was found in a study of color versus b&w advertisements (ray, sawyer and strong, 1971). in this study we examined the repetition results for two series of ads which were identical except that one series had one color added to the pictures of fruits or vegetables depicted. the color ads were superior in getting the message recalled, but the black and white ads, if recalled, were superior in generating learning of the main message. in a follow-up field experiment using the two ad series, the black and white print ads were more effective than the color in producing ad awareness. it seemed that, in this real advertising situation, the black and white ads generated more information processing while the color ads elicited just a surface awareness after a certain point, no matter what the repetition level.
all of these examples--evidence of the low involvement hierarchy, the limit to information processing in advertising situations and the specific cases of that limit--show what can happen to cherished cip folklore in the real advertising situation.
as i have already pointed out, one of the key differences between most lab persuasion studies and the typical advertising situation is that attention is a given in the labs but a goal hard to attain in advertising. our original assessment of this bias was that it was a main effect, that is, if an ad or message did well in the lab it would do relatively well in the field--pro-vided it had the appropriate schedule.
now we are beginning to believe that there is not only a greater main effect difference than we had originally presumed but also there are interactions. that is, ads that do well in a forced exposure lab situation may be the very ones that do poorly in the field.
my evidence for this comes from a series of lab studies on television clutter carried out by peter webb (ray and webb, 1976, webb and ray, 1977). peter first determined that his lab approach was producing attention patterns similar to that found in field research (e.g., burke, 1972). once this was established he was able to manipulate the commercial break pattern in several television program types.
his main finding was that consumers don't just randomly ignore commercials. they seem to actually avoid them--and with considerable skill at that.
consumers were amazingly well-schooled as to the pattern of commercial breaks on their favorite programs. this was particularly true for soap operas. when peter tried different commercial schedules during those programs than the schedules to which consumers were accustomed, they very often asked why this unusual pattern was being used. during debriefing respondents told us more about how carefully they watched for the pattern of commercial interruptions. for instance, one working woman actually made an audio tape of soap operas so that she could plan her housework during the commercial breaks while she was home having lunch and watching her program.
the data supported the patterning beyond such anecdotal evidence, however. even those respondents who made no visual or verbal indication of noting an unusual pattern were able to avoid being affected by the most common interruption schedule for the program. in other words, virtually all response measures were lower for the most common type of interruption schedule as opposed to the more unusual ones.
before this research we had assumed that the typical laboratory information processing of communication research studies erred in forcing people to read or view the messages while in a more natural situation consumers would not be biased toward or away from viewing the messages. now this research indicates that the error of typical laboratory communication research studies may be even greater than we had previously imagined. while the lab studies bias people toward viewing the material, the audience/in the natural situation may have learned to be biased completely in the other direction, that is, away from viewing and processing the messages. in advertising we have to be concerned not just with getting attention. we have to gain attention from people who are actively avoiding us.
given this bias, however, is it possible that certain commercials--which may not do well in typical persuasion research--might be less susceptible to the vagaries of clutter and consumer avoidance? peter webb examined the extent to which involvement would enhance message effectiveness. he used the "connections" measure developed by krugman (1966-67). as hypothesized, those commercials shown to be high in involvement in a prestudy seemed unaffected by changes in clutter (4 versus 8 commercials) or position in a string of commercials, while low involvement commercials were dramatically effected.
even further we found that commercials which would not do well in typical persuasion research did well in a normal exposure situation, possibly because they generated involvement and attention.
more specifically we showed, at least in one case, that counterarguing can enhance persuasion.
in cip and lab persuasion studies in which the respondents are forced to be exposed to the messages, counter-arguing is a negative to be avoided at all cost. but when exposure conditions are more realistic and attention is an important goal, counterarguing can sometimes enhance persuasion by increasing attention and making the message more memorable.
in an nimh-sponsored study on the effects of anti-drug abuse messages, we found exactly that effect of counter-arguing (ray, ward and reed, 1976). we studied, among others, two commercials which had quite opposite patterns of cognitive response. "walkout" was a memorable commercial which produced nearly violent counterarguing from the parents audience. "big brother" was not quite as memorable but produced positive cognitive responses such as "connections." in natural lab experiments and in a split cable field experiment the walkout commercial was substantially more effective than the big brother commercial in producing, for instance, positive attitude change, booklet interest and reported numbers of times that respondents thought, read about, and talked about drug abuse during the time the commercials were running.
in this case, as in many situations in the real world, some response was better than no response at all. in such situations the counterarguing so worrisome to information processing researchers, can be a benefit.
thus, with regard to attention, the advertising situation is more difficult than we expected and involving commercials surmounted the difficulty somewhat, even when they were the opposite of those that do well in the typical lab study.
the results i've discussed thus far indicate that we must take great care in translating cip and persuasion lab research to the field in terms of advertising. in many cases lab and field results will be markedly different. not only should we apply lab results carefully but we should start to alter our research procedures to take account of the nature of the advertising situation.
but there is another approach that might be taken and is illustrated by my final example. instead of trying to translate to advertising, we can ignore it, and--like the drunk looking for his lost keys under the street light--we cam look for situations in the real world that are similar to those in the lab.
this was and is the approach used by many applied persuasion researchers in the late 60's and in the 70's. for instance, on our campus, philip zimbardo trained hundreds of stanford students--on one occasion in a mass rally--to use social psychological principles in canvassing for peace candidates and issues in 1970. this led to a little booklet entitled canvassing for peace which zimbardo wrote with robert abelson (1970). a more general statement of this approach is in the zimbardo and ebbesen paperback influencing attitudes and changing behavior (1969) and in varela (1971). in consumer research and application it is represented by those who see the most direct applications in personal selling or at the very least in print advertising, usually in an industrial or public service setting--where there might be involvement and the type of processing found in the lab.
even in such set-up situations, however, i would argue that we need to take great care in application.
for our example here, i'll use the "foot-in-the door" technique. the seminal foot-in-the-door study was conducted by freedman and fraser (1966), who asked residents to place a small card in their window. two weeks later these residents were asked to display a large, clumsily lettered sign. subjects who had been approached to comply with the earlier request were much more likely to agree with the second one.
although the foot-in-the-door or small request approach has been found to be quite effective in the social psychological literature, one field experiment done by william swinyard demonstrated a situation in which adding a small request to a sales message actually decreased the combined effect of the sales message and later advertising exposures (swinyard and ray 1976, 1977).
the key response was intention to volunteer for red cross work and the small requests were to put a little sign in the prospect's window and wear a red cross pin for at least two shopping trips. both in terms of main effect and interaction with advertising exposures, the small request manipulation was less effective than a persuasive message without the small request. again, the explanation appears to be related quite directly to the situation. the red cross is an issue about which respondents may feel a good deal of guilt. they "know" that they should give blood or volunteer, yet they are fearful or don't want to take the time. they look for simple ways to relieve the guilt and still avoid the anxiety brought on by the needle and the inconvenience of time demands. compliance with the small request may have provided an easy way for respondents to relieve this guilt, bringing with it a feeling that, "i have made my 'contribution' already...i don't need to do any more.".
whether you agree with this explanation or not, you should know that ours is not the only research that found the small request manipulation lacking in social marketing situations. alice tybout (1976) found that a small request manipulation worked only when the commitment was made salient to respondents. this obviously fits the concern in this paper with the differential involvement found in persuasion research and in the field.
in conclusion, i believe i have an answer to the question that started this paper. consumer information processing research relates to consumer information processing if the situation in the research is the same as the situation in the processing. practitioners can use our findings if they are very careful to determine whether there is a match between the situation in the research and the situation in which real world processing takes place. at this point i perceive a difference between the situation in most research and that in the most common persuasion category, advertising most advertising, especially the broadcast kind, represents a low involvement situation. but it is possible to take even present research findings and analyze their implications for advertising. and fortunately the trend in information processing research seems to be toward more natural exposure and response conditions.
robert p. abelson and philip zimbardo, canvassing for peace (ann arbor, michigan: society for the psychological study of social issues, 1970).
burke marketing research, inc. "viewer attitudes toward commercial clutter on television and media buying implications,'' presentation to 18th arf conference (november 14, 1972).
jonathan l. freedman and s. c. fraser, "compliance without pressure: the foot-in-the-door technique," journal of personality and social psychology, 4 (march 1966), 195-202.
carl i. hovland, "reconciling conflicting results derived from experimental and survey studies of attitude change," american psychologist, 14 (january 1959), 8-17.
j. p. keating and timothy c. brock, "a myth about distraction," american scientist, 59 (december 1971), 416-9.
robert a. osterhouse and timothy c. brock, "distraction increases yielding to propaganda by inhibition counterarguing," journal of personality and social psychology, 15 (august 1970), 344-58.
michael l. ray and alan g. sawyer, "repetition in media models: a laboratory technique," journal of marketing research, 8 (february 1971), 20-30.
michael l. ray in collaboration with alan g. sawyer, michael l. rothschild, roger m. heeler, edward c. strong, and jerome b. reed, "marketing communication and the hierarchy-of-effects," in peter clarke (ed.), new models for mass communication research, beverly hills, california: sage publications, 1973).
michael l. ray, alan g. sawyer and edward c. strong, "frequency effects revisited," journal of advertising research, 11 (february 1971), 14-20.
michael l. ray, scott ward and jerome b. reed, "pretesting of anti-drug abuse education and information campaigns: summary report of a marketing science institute special project," in ronald e. ostman (ed.) communication research and drug education (beverly hills, california: sage publications, 1976).
michael l. ray and peter webb, "experimental research on the effects of tv clutter: dealing with the difficult media environment," report no. 76-102, marketing science institute, cambridge, massachusetts (april 1976).
claude e. shannon and w. weaver, the mathematical theory of communication (urbana: university of illinois press, 1949).
william r. swinyard, "advertising-selling interactions," journal of marketing research, 14 (1977).
alice m. tybout and bobby j. calder, "threats to internal and external validity in the field setting," in william d. perreault, jr. (ed.) advances in consumer research, vol. iv, (chapel hill, north carolina: association for consumer research, 1977).
jacobo a. varela, psychological solutions to social problems: an introduction to social technology (new york: academic press, 1971).
peter webb and michael l. ray, "experimental research on the effects of tv clutter," advertising quarterly (1977).
peter l. wright, "the harassed decision maker: time pressures, distractions, and the use of evidence," journal of applied psychology, 59 (1974).
philip zimbardo and ebbe ebbesen, influencing attitudes and changing behavior (reading, massachusetts: addison-wesley publishing, 1969).


text:
Organizations around the globe are facing a similar problem: how to make sure the data they’re looking at accurately reflects the data they need to make the right business decisions.
Kash Medhi, Senior Product Specialist at Collibra, will discuss how businesses in different industries – including finance, healthcare, retail and government – look at data governance, common challenges, and solutions.
He’ll also share how NetApp was able to successfully enable data governance with the project lifecycle.
To be data driven, you need authority around the data and need to assign ownership to the data. That’s where the crucial role of Chief Data Officer comes in.

lowercased:
organizations around the globe are facing a similar problem: how to make sure the data they’re looking at accurately reflects the data they need to make the right business decisions.
kash medhi, senior product specialist at collibra, will discuss how businesses in different industries – including finance, healthcare, retail and government – look at data governance, common challenges, and solutions.
he’ll also share how netapp was able to successfully enable data governance with the project lifecycle.
to be data driven, you need authority around the data and need to assign ownership to the data. that’s where the crucial role of chief data officer comes in.


text:
Reconstituted Skimmed Milk, Belgian White Chocolate Coating (31%) (Sugar, Cocoa Butter, Dried Skimmed Milk, Anhydrous Milk Fat, Coconut Oil, Emulsifiers: Soya Lecithins, Polyglycerol Polyricinoleate; Flavouring), Raspberry Sauce (11%) (Sugar, Raspberry Juice from Concentrate, Water, Modified Corn Starch, Thickener: Pectins; Acidity Regulator: Citric Acid; Flavouring, Black Carrot Juice Concentrate, Colour: Anthocyanins), Sugar, Reconstituted Peach Purée (5%), Coconut Oil, Glucose Syrup, Vegetarian Whey Powder (Milk), Dried Skimmed Milk, Freeze Dried Raspberry Pieces, Emulsifier: Mono- and Diglycerides of Fatty Acids; Stabilisers: Locust Bean Gum, Guar Gum; Acidity Regulator: Citric Acid; Colours: Annatto, Carotenes; Flavouring.
Peach flavoured ice cream lollies with a raspberry sauce swirl, and a Belgian white chocolate coating with freeze dried raspberry pieces.
These are delish. Better than any of the more expensive Magnums. Lovely white chocolate with dried peach bits and so tasty peach Melba ice cream. Love them!
The peach flavour perfectly blends in with the smooth white chocolate. A real treat at a very affordable price and SO much better than the cheap jack Walls Magnums.

lowercased:
reconstituted skimmed milk, belgian white chocolate coating (31%) (sugar, cocoa butter, dried skimmed milk, anhydrous milk fat, coconut oil, emulsifiers: soya lecithins, polyglycerol polyricinoleate; flavouring), raspberry sauce (11%) (sugar, raspberry juice from concentrate, water, modified corn starch, thickener: pectins; acidity regulator: citric acid; flavouring, black carrot juice concentrate, colour: anthocyanins), sugar, reconstituted peach purée (5%), coconut oil, glucose syrup, vegetarian whey powder (milk), dried skimmed milk, freeze dried raspberry pieces, emulsifier: mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids; stabilisers: locust bean gum, guar gum; acidity regulator: citric acid; colours: annatto, carotenes; flavouring.
peach flavoured ice cream lollies with a raspberry sauce swirl, and a belgian white chocolate coating with freeze dried raspberry pieces.
these are delish. better than any of the more expensive magnums. lovely white chocolate with dried peach bits and so tasty peach melba ice cream. love them!
the peach flavour perfectly blends in with the smooth white chocolate. a real treat at a very affordable price and so much better than the cheap jack walls magnums.


text:
In the popular imagination, Orange County tends to conjure images of sunny suburbs and feuding housewives, not haunted mansions and shadowy valleys. But as paranormal investigator and director of OC Ghosts and Legends, Orange County resident Cris August has had more than a few paranormal experiences in the area. OC Ghosts and Legends has been leading tours, investigations and events since 2011, exposing the history and darker side of the county.
August took some time from his investigations work to share with us about his organization, Orange County history and the paranormal.
Cris August: OC Ghosts and Legends was founded simply with a passion for the paranormal and the desire to help others. We formed in 2011 as just two guys with individual knowledge and experience wanting to take it to the next level by conducting independent investigations into some of Orange County’s most haunted locations. Over time, we felt confident in responding to calls from private residences who claim to have supernatural activity within their homes. These people really didn’t know where else to turn and how to get help.
We take tremendous pride in the fact that people entrusted us to be in their homes and open up to us about these disturbances. While our client privacy is of the highest importance, it humbles us to know that we were at least able to arm these folks with some knowledge and confidence to take back their space. It’s a truly rewarding feeling that stands true with everything we do today.
HEN: How does Orange County compare to other older parts of the country in terms of ghost hunting?
CA: Most people don’t have much insight into the history of Orange County. We can thank shows like The Real Housewives [of Orange County] and MTV reality shows such as Laguna Beach for painting a picture of Orange County as nothing but cookie-cutter homes and surf cities. However, Orange County is rich in history, particularly the site of our signature San Juan Capistrano ghost tour along California’s oldest occupied neighborhood dating back to the 1700s. Our other signature location Black Star Canyon is home to Orange County’s most notorious ghost stories, including its coal mining operation in the mid-1800s and its Native American history.
I often say that something doesn’t have to be “old” to be haunted. We think that Orange County can most definitely stand on its own in comparison to its counterparts throughout the country.
HEN: What are some particularly active areas?
CA: People often ask us what the most haunted place is based upon our investigations. This is always a tough question to answer because spiritual and paranormal activity manifests in so many forms. Experiencing any of them may impact one person more or less than the next. Everyone experiences things differently. San Juan Capistrano has presented us with some of our most amazing audio and EVP (electronic voice phenomena) evidence whereas Black Star Canyon is a grab bag of audio, visual and other bizarre circumstances. They are both crazy active, just in different ways.
Any location or venue we present to the public via tours, events or presentations, we stand behind it having significant paranormal activity.
Some of our other locations such as the Bracken Fern Manor and Tudor House, we (and our guests) have experienced physical and emotional encounters that quite literally were life-altering for some.
HEN: What is your background and how did you get into this?
CA: My background in this field stemmed from a lifetime of unfounded fear and curiosity of anything unknown or unexplainable. I probably watched too much Unsolved Mysteries and was traumatized by movies such as Fire in the Sky, frankly.
Ironically, I never had any direct experiences with anything supernatural in nature growing up. That is until my early 20s when I began experiencing strange sightings, shadow people, disembodied voices and cups moving on their own. These events always took place in groups of three on and off for a couple years. It was entirely foreign to me. That was the catalyst for researching and visiting various haunted hot spots in California. The rest is history.
Today, I conduct field investigations with my team and am actively studying in the field of metaphysical science.
HEN: Are there any risks in the work you do?
CA: Being a skeptic of sorts I generally give an open-ended answer to that question. However, there are risks to everything. Regardless of one’s belief system, you should always approach anomalous research and investigations with great respect and care. We will always be under the assumption that whoever or whatever we are communicating with was once a human being and we treat them as we would wish to be treated. Intent is everything.
HEN: Any do’s and don’ts?
CA: Be kind and respectful. This especially applies to your environment. When people invite us into their place of business or their home, we leave everything exactly the way we found it, as if we were never there. Our reputation of being trusted and professional is critical.
Do not break and enter or trespass. Sadly, too many curious people do this and it leaves a bad taste in the mouth of the property owner for any potential investigations to be conducted there in the future. Not to mention that it’s illegal.
Be safe and don’t be inebriated during an investigation. You need to be focused and in a clear head space.
Follow Cris August and Orange County Ghosts and Legends on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

lowercased:
in the popular imagination, orange county tends to conjure images of sunny suburbs and feuding housewives, not haunted mansions and shadowy valleys. but as paranormal investigator and director of oc ghosts and legends, orange county resident cris august has had more than a few paranormal experiences in the area. oc ghosts and legends has been leading tours, investigations and events since 2011, exposing the history and darker side of the county.
august took some time from his investigations work to share with us about his organization, orange county history and the paranormal.
cris august: oc ghosts and legends was founded simply with a passion for the paranormal and the desire to help others. we formed in 2011 as just two guys with individual knowledge and experience wanting to take it to the next level by conducting independent investigations into some of orange county’s most haunted locations. over time, we felt confident in responding to calls from private residences who claim to have supernatural activity within their homes. these people really didn’t know where else to turn and how to get help.
we take tremendous pride in the fact that people entrusted us to be in their homes and open up to us about these disturbances. while our client privacy is of the highest importance, it humbles us to know that we were at least able to arm these folks with some knowledge and confidence to take back their space. it’s a truly rewarding feeling that stands true with everything we do today.
hen: how does orange county compare to other older parts of the country in terms of ghost hunting?
ca: most people don’t have much insight into the history of orange county. we can thank shows like the real housewives [of orange county] and mtv reality shows such as laguna beach for painting a picture of orange county as nothing but cookie-cutter homes and surf cities. however, orange county is rich in history, particularly the site of our signature san juan capistrano ghost tour along california’s oldest occupied neighborhood dating back to the 1700s. our other signature location black star canyon is home to orange county’s most notorious ghost stories, including its coal mining operation in the mid-1800s and its native american history.
i often say that something doesn’t have to be “old” to be haunted. we think that orange county can most definitely stand on its own in comparison to its counterparts throughout the country.
hen: what are some particularly active areas?
ca: people often ask us what the most haunted place is based upon our investigations. this is always a tough question to answer because spiritual and paranormal activity manifests in so many forms. experiencing any of them may impact one person more or less than the next. everyone experiences things differently. san juan capistrano has presented us with some of our most amazing audio and evp (electronic voice phenomena) evidence whereas black star canyon is a grab bag of audio, visual and other bizarre circumstances. they are both crazy active, just in different ways.
any location or venue we present to the public via tours, events or presentations, we stand behind it having significant paranormal activity.
some of our other locations such as the bracken fern manor and tudor house, we (and our guests) have experienced physical and emotional encounters that quite literally were life-altering for some.
hen: what is your background and how did you get into this?
ca: my background in this field stemmed from a lifetime of unfounded fear and curiosity of anything unknown or unexplainable. i probably watched too much unsolved mysteries and was traumatized by movies such as fire in the sky, frankly.
ironically, i never had any direct experiences with anything supernatural in nature growing up. that is until my early 20s when i began experiencing strange sightings, shadow people, disembodied voices and cups moving on their own. these events always took place in groups of three on and off for a couple years. it was entirely foreign to me. that was the catalyst for researching and visiting various haunted hot spots in california. the rest is history.
today, i conduct field investigations with my team and am actively studying in the field of metaphysical science.
hen: are there any risks in the work you do?
ca: being a skeptic of sorts i generally give an open-ended answer to that question. however, there are risks to everything. regardless of one’s belief system, you should always approach anomalous research and investigations with great respect and care. we will always be under the assumption that whoever or whatever we are communicating with was once a human being and we treat them as we would wish to be treated. intent is everything.
hen: any do’s and don’ts?
ca: be kind and respectful. this especially applies to your environment. when people invite us into their place of business or their home, we leave everything exactly the way we found it, as if we were never there. our reputation of being trusted and professional is critical.
do not break and enter or trespass. sadly, too many curious people do this and it leaves a bad taste in the mouth of the property owner for any potential investigations to be conducted there in the future. not to mention that it’s illegal.
be safe and don’t be inebriated during an investigation. you need to be focused and in a clear head space.
follow cris august and orange county ghosts and legends on facebook, twitter and instagram.


text:
Damiano Damiani’s film is an excellent reason to look beyond the holy “Dollars” trinity.
Deranged by gold, hot-blooded passion, whiskey, and revolutionary fervor, the moral compass spins wildly throughout Damiano Damiani’s A Bullet for the General, a gray-hearted spaghetti western that more closely resembles Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian or Alex Cox’s mad 1987 film Walker than the flagship titles of the subgenre, Sergio Leone’s “Dollars” trilogy. A band of Mexican rebels, led by the wild-eyed “El Chuncho” (Gian Maria Volonté), wanders across the Mexican countryside with a vague plan to murder and ransack the Mexican army and then to sell their spoils to a nameless revolutionary general. During a train heist that opens the film, they’re joined by the gringo Bill Tate (baby-faced Lou Castel, then a breakout star, thanks to Marco Bellocchio’s Fists in the Pocket), whose motives remain unclear until much later in the film, when the stakes have been reweighed and shifted.
One of the most shocking moments of violence in the western genre takes place in the wordless opening of Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo, a coldblooded killing that sets the barometric pressure for much of what comes after. The killings in Damiani’s film are often characterized by the same callous unfairness, as many of the rebel band’s victims include unarmed civilians or injured soldiers. In one case, a wealthy landowner’s death sentence is passed, but carried out during a narrative ellipsis, so that we don’t know what happened to him until the camera passes over his corpse during a wind-down of drunken revelry. The rebels quite clearly love the proletariat (peasants and prostitutes alike) as much as they hate both the bourgeoisie and its paid army, but Tate—who dresses impeccably, wearing a suit and a pair of leather gloves, in the manner of Jack Nicholson in Monte Hellman’s The Shooting—gradually begins to hint that he’s got an agenda that might not be healthy for the anarcho-hedonist spirit of El Chuncho’s crew.
Set in Mexico but filmed in Spain, like Leone’s westerns, A Bullet for the General balances its dizzying moral abyss with stunning landscape photography and a keen compositional sense. Even during complex battle scenes, Damiani, with editor Renato Cinquini, keeps the line of action and causality clear, which is all the more remarkable since it’s frequently difficult to keep a clear picture of where the characters are heading, what everyone seems to want, and what they’re actually thinking. When the momentum lags, the contrast between the leads’ performance styles—Volonté‘s silent-cinema intensity and Castel’s vampiric knowing-ness—is more than enough to keep things afloat.
A mixed bag. When the screen is filled with the vastness of open roads and rocky terrain, Blue Underground’s high-definition transfer, which uses nearly flawless materials, is quite glorious. When humans enter the frame, especially during night scenes, faces and objects seem a little frayed, though there isn’t much evidence of edge enhancement. Nevertheless, this gets a pass for the sheer vividness and clarity of colors, and the jaw-dropping wide shots. The DTS mono tracks (English and Italian, though the difference is often negligible, since the characters frequently switch to English and Spanish with no explanation) are strong and resonant, given the imperfections in the original recording and mixing.
No commentary here, but Blue Underground did honest work by including an interview with Damiano Damiani, and a bonus disc containing “Gian Maria Volonté: Un Attore Contro,” an entertaining and informative documentary on the vastly underrated star of movies by directors as varied as Sergio Leone, Jean-Pierre Melville, Francesco Rosi, and Elio Petri. Clips from Volonté’s work are shown, as well as tributes by collaborators. The disc with “Un Attore Contro” is a DVD; the Blu-ray presents A Bullet for the General both in its 118-minute international version, as well as the U.S. release version, which is three minutes shorter.
If all you know of the spaghetti western is Sergio Leone, Damiano Damiani’s A Bullet for the General, presented in a largely satisfactory Blu-ray from Blue Underground, is an excellent reason to look beyond the holy “Dollars” trinity.

lowercased:
damiano damiani’s film is an excellent reason to look beyond the holy “dollars” trinity.
deranged by gold, hot-blooded passion, whiskey, and revolutionary fervor, the moral compass spins wildly throughout damiano damiani’s a bullet for the general, a gray-hearted spaghetti western that more closely resembles cormac mccarthy’s blood meridian or alex cox’s mad 1987 film walker than the flagship titles of the subgenre, sergio leone’s “dollars” trilogy. a band of mexican rebels, led by the wild-eyed “el chuncho” (gian maria volonté), wanders across the mexican countryside with a vague plan to murder and ransack the mexican army and then to sell their spoils to a nameless revolutionary general. during a train heist that opens the film, they’re joined by the gringo bill tate (baby-faced lou castel, then a breakout star, thanks to marco bellocchio’s fists in the pocket), whose motives remain unclear until much later in the film, when the stakes have been reweighed and shifted.
one of the most shocking moments of violence in the western genre takes place in the wordless opening of howard hawks’s rio bravo, a coldblooded killing that sets the barometric pressure for much of what comes after. the killings in damiani’s film are often characterized by the same callous unfairness, as many of the rebel band’s victims include unarmed civilians or injured soldiers. in one case, a wealthy landowner’s death sentence is passed, but carried out during a narrative ellipsis, so that we don’t know what happened to him until the camera passes over his corpse during a wind-down of drunken revelry. the rebels quite clearly love the proletariat (peasants and prostitutes alike) as much as they hate both the bourgeoisie and its paid army, but tate—who dresses impeccably, wearing a suit and a pair of leather gloves, in the manner of jack nicholson in monte hellman’s the shooting—gradually begins to hint that he’s got an agenda that might not be healthy for the anarcho-hedonist spirit of el chuncho’s crew.
set in mexico but filmed in spain, like leone’s westerns, a bullet for the general balances its dizzying moral abyss with stunning landscape photography and a keen compositional sense. even during complex battle scenes, damiani, with editor renato cinquini, keeps the line of action and causality clear, which is all the more remarkable since it’s frequently difficult to keep a clear picture of where the characters are heading, what everyone seems to want, and what they’re actually thinking. when the momentum lags, the contrast between the leads’ performance styles—volonté‘s silent-cinema intensity and castel’s vampiric knowing-ness—is more than enough to keep things afloat.
a mixed bag. when the screen is filled with the vastness of open roads and rocky terrain, blue underground’s high-definition transfer, which uses nearly flawless materials, is quite glorious. when humans enter the frame, especially during night scenes, faces and objects seem a little frayed, though there isn’t much evidence of edge enhancement. nevertheless, this gets a pass for the sheer vividness and clarity of colors, and the jaw-dropping wide shots. the dts mono tracks (english and italian, though the difference is often negligible, since the characters frequently switch to english and spanish with no explanation) are strong and resonant, given the imperfections in the original recording and mixing.
no commentary here, but blue underground did honest work by including an interview with damiano damiani, and a bonus disc containing “gian maria volonté: un attore contro,” an entertaining and informative documentary on the vastly underrated star of movies by directors as varied as sergio leone, jean-pierre melville, francesco rosi, and elio petri. clips from volonté’s work are shown, as well as tributes by collaborators. the disc with “un attore contro” is a dvd; the blu-ray presents a bullet for the general both in its 118-minute international version, as well as the u.s. release version, which is three minutes shorter.
if all you know of the spaghetti western is sergio leone, damiano damiani’s a bullet for the general, presented in a largely satisfactory blu-ray from blue underground, is an excellent reason to look beyond the holy “dollars” trinity.


text: -With eyes closed and her heart beating rapidly in her chest, she sits upon her throne with her sword lying across the tops of her thigh. The sounds of battle were clsoer now; it wouldn’t be much longer now. Head bowed and eyes closed, she takes a deep breathe through her nose and breaths slowly out through her sensuous mouth, past soft curved lips, calming her body and spirit for the battle to come. Confident and at peace, she lifts the scabbard from her lap and draws the sleek blade as the double doors across the room opens and the enemy spills into the room. It is a good day to fight, she reflects with a smile as she rises from her throne, and a good day to prove her worth! LadySamurai; the beautifully crafted, 1/6 scale statuette, with her battle ready, sensual charm is the latest the line of exclusive figurines designed and sculpted by the very talented Wei Ho. Order yours today!

lowercased: -with eyes closed and her heart beating rapidly in her chest, she sits upon her throne with her sword lying across the tops of her thigh. the sounds of battle were clsoer now; it wouldn’t be much longer now. head bowed and eyes closed, she takes a deep breathe through her nose and breaths slowly out through her sensuous mouth, past soft curved lips, calming her body and spirit for the battle to come. confident and at peace, she lifts the scabbard from her lap and draws the sleek blade as the double doors across the room opens and the enemy spills into the room. it is a good day to fight, she reflects with a smile as she rises from her throne, and a good day to prove her worth! ladysamurai; the beautifully crafted, 1/6 scale statuette, with her battle ready, sensual charm is the latest the line of exclusive figurines designed and sculpted by the very talented wei ho. order yours today!


text:
Information and all the latest about our organization, various activities organized, services and publications offered.
Please find here links and information on a range of training activities.
Recognizing the fundamental power of music and its tremendous significance in people’s lives CCRSM aims in bringing together and actively engage and challenge musicians and/or creators, educationalists and/or researchers, children and/or adults, cultural entrepreneurs and investors all of which always strive to go one step further. CCRSM serves as a centre for the creation and implementation of new ideas related to music leadership, music learning and music professional development in Cyprus, its regional communities, the Mediterranean basin and Europe at large.

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information and all the latest about our organization, various activities organized, services and publications offered.
please find here links and information on a range of training activities.
recognizing the fundamental power of music and its tremendous significance in people’s lives ccrsm aims in bringing together and actively engage and challenge musicians and/or creators, educationalists and/or researchers, children and/or adults, cultural entrepreneurs and investors all of which always strive to go one step further. ccrsm serves as a centre for the creation and implementation of new ideas related to music leadership, music learning and music professional development in cyprus, its regional communities, the mediterranean basin and europe at large.


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The US and China are by far the largest markets for smartphones and tablets (iOS and Android), details Flurry in a new study. Measured by active smart device installed base, the US (222 million) and China (221 million) were neck and neck in January. But given China’s rapid growth curve, Flurry projects that China became the largest market this month, surpassing the US for the first time. Beyond these giant markets, though, no other country comes close: the UK was 3rd in January with an installed base of only 43 million.
Indeed, Flurry sees only India as potentially overtaking China at some point in the future, given the former country’s population of more than 1.2 billion. For now, though, with an installed base of less than one-tenth of China’s (19 million), India remains well behind. Read the rest at MarketingCharts.

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the us and china are by far the largest markets for smartphones and tablets (ios and android), details flurry in a new study. measured by active smart device installed base, the us (222 million) and china (221 million) were neck and neck in january. but given china’s rapid growth curve, flurry projects that china became the largest market this month, surpassing the us for the first time. beyond these giant markets, though, no other country comes close: the uk was 3rd in january with an installed base of only 43 million.
indeed, flurry sees only india as potentially overtaking china at some point in the future, given the former country’s population of more than 1.2 billion. for now, though, with an installed base of less than one-tenth of china’s (19 million), india remains well behind. read the rest at marketingcharts.


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Welcome to the official Website of the Tornado Big Band!
Made up entirely of students from the Senior, Intermediate, and Junior High Schools of the Butler Area School District in Butler, PA, this band is in its seventh year of performing jazz, latin, rock and classic big band songs.
Led by music educator and founder, Jeff Kroner, this group is an extra-curricular activity of the Butler Area School District , and members are selected each year through auditions which are open to Butler School District student musicians in the 7th through 12th grade and are usually held in the Fall of each academic year.
Help Promote your FAVORITE Band!
Visit "The Store" page - where you can find out how to get TBB brand items to show the world who's your favorite Big Band! Any profits generated from sale of these items will go directly to the Tornado Big Band. CHECK IT OUT!
The Tornado Big Band played its final concert of the 2009-2010 academic year at the Succop Theater on the main campus of Butler County Community College on Sunday, June 6, 2010. The one hour program included a variety of music including traditional big band, jazz, funk, and salsa tunes. Numerous band members took their turns at improv solos and Alex, Ben, Sarah, and Laura entertained the audience with their vocal solos. The audience enjoyed the program and showed their approval with a long standing ovation.
Good luck in your future endeavors and thanks for your talent and dedication to the Tornado Big Band. We'll miss you!
The 2010 Tornado Big Band Dance was held on Friday, April 9, 2010 from 7:00 PM until 10:00 PM at the New Lyndora American Legion Hall at 150 Legion Memorial Lane just off of Kohler Ave. The crowd of about 200 people including little children, teenagers, parents, and senior citizens came out dance and to enjoy the music performed by the Tornado Big Band under the direction of Mr. Jeff Kroner, the Butler Vocal Jazz Ensemble under the direction of Mr. Bryan Helsel, and the Faculty Trio of Misters Helsel, Kroner, and Karenbauer. The evening was a great success. Hope to see you all back for the 2011 Big Band Dance.

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welcome to the official website of the tornado big band!
made up entirely of students from the senior, intermediate, and junior high schools of the butler area school district in butler, pa, this band is in its seventh year of performing jazz, latin, rock and classic big band songs.
led by music educator and founder, jeff kroner, this group is an extra-curricular activity of the butler area school district , and members are selected each year through auditions which are open to butler school district student musicians in the 7th through 12th grade and are usually held in the fall of each academic year.
help promote your favorite band!
visit "the store" page - where you can find out how to get tbb brand items to show the world who's your favorite big band! any profits generated from sale of these items will go directly to the tornado big band. check it out!
the tornado big band played its final concert of the 2009-2010 academic year at the succop theater on the main campus of butler county community college on sunday, june 6, 2010. the one hour program included a variety of music including traditional big band, jazz, funk, and salsa tunes. numerous band members took their turns at improv solos and alex, ben, sarah, and laura entertained the audience with their vocal solos. the audience enjoyed the program and showed their approval with a long standing ovation.
good luck in your future endeavors and thanks for your talent and dedication to the tornado big band. we'll miss you!
the 2010 tornado big band dance was held on friday, april 9, 2010 from 7:00 pm until 10:00 pm at the new lyndora american legion hall at 150 legion memorial lane just off of kohler ave. the crowd of about 200 people including little children, teenagers, parents, and senior citizens came out dance and to enjoy the music performed by the tornado big band under the direction of mr. jeff kroner, the butler vocal jazz ensemble under the direction of mr. bryan helsel, and the faculty trio of misters helsel, kroner, and karenbauer. the evening was a great success. hope to see you all back for the 2011 big band dance.


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Moving is one of those moments that can be very exciting or stressing. You should seek for the services of professional movers if you don’t want those kind of experiences. Below are some of the advantages of hiring reliable movers view here for more.
The second advantage of hiring professional movers is that all your possessions will be insured as well as safe. It is worth noting that moving by yourself means that you take the risk of no compensation if anything happens to your household items. Hiring the services of professional movers is advantageous as it is their priority to ensure that all your items are kept well. It is worth noting that the moving company will be in a position to compensate you if anything happened to your household possessions during the moving process.
The last advantage of hiring the services of professional movers is that they are inexpensive compared to doing the task by yourself. Moving by yourself will be expensive since you must buy bubble wraps and other necessities that might make the costs go even higher than those charged by movers. The cost estimates of the professional movers will be quite low they already have the moving equipment that for your case you will have to purchase. Doing the moving by yourself will also require extra labor to help you load and offload heavy household items thus digging deeper into your pocket.
For more info about the benefits of hiring moving companies, click this page and learn more.

lowercased:
moving is one of those moments that can be very exciting or stressing. you should seek for the services of professional movers if you don’t want those kind of experiences. below are some of the advantages of hiring reliable movers view here for more.
the second advantage of hiring professional movers is that all your possessions will be insured as well as safe. it is worth noting that moving by yourself means that you take the risk of no compensation if anything happens to your household items. hiring the services of professional movers is advantageous as it is their priority to ensure that all your items are kept well. it is worth noting that the moving company will be in a position to compensate you if anything happened to your household possessions during the moving process.
the last advantage of hiring the services of professional movers is that they are inexpensive compared to doing the task by yourself. moving by yourself will be expensive since you must buy bubble wraps and other necessities that might make the costs go even higher than those charged by movers. the cost estimates of the professional movers will be quite low they already have the moving equipment that for your case you will have to purchase. doing the moving by yourself will also require extra labor to help you load and offload heavy household items thus digging deeper into your pocket.
for more info about the benefits of hiring moving companies, click this page and learn more.


text:
This year I've jumped a tax bracket (15% to 25%), thanks to having a real job (not a graduate student stipend) and working real hard at it. But I had an idea of how to dip back into the lower tax bracket by saving more for retirement.
Say I have $40,000 of taxable income this year. The 25% tax bracket starts at $34,000. I figured that if I opened a retirement account that uses pre-tax dollars (like an individual 401K), I could claim that deduction. If I contributed $6,001 to that fund, I'd deduct that and have a taxable income of $33,999, putting me in the 15% tax bracket. Instead of owing 25% of $40,000 (which is $10,000), I'd owe 15% of $33,999 (which is $5,100). I'd have locked up $6,001 to save $4,900.
I asked some people about this scheme.
I read some money blogs (investing for retirement, frugality, etc.) and decided to ask one of them about my scheme. He wrote a blog post answering my question (and renamed me), but didn't really address the scheminess of my scheme. Sure, it's great to save more for retirement, and it doesn't make much sense to have two IRAs (a Roth and a Traditional), but would it really reduce my tax burden so dramatically? No.
I didn't understand how tax brackets work. I thought that I'd pay 15% of all my $33,999 taxable income (total=$5,100) or 25% of all my $34,000 taxable income (total=$8,500), with no middle ground. But it's not like that. EVERYBODY pays 10% on the first $8,375, then 15% on the next ($34,000-$8,375=) $25,625, then 25% on any amount over that, and so forth.
So if I had carried out my scheme, my tax burden (on $33,999) would be $4,681. Without opening the new retirement account, I'd have a taxable income of $40,000, and a tax burden of $6,181. It would really only save me $1,500, which is what you'd expect from a $6,000 deduction in the 25% tax bracket.
I realize this may be jibberish. The point is that there isn't much to be gained (or lost) by jumping tax brackets. It's not that big a deal.
I'll probably open a 401K anyway. It doesn't hurt to save money when possible.

lowercased:
this year i've jumped a tax bracket (15% to 25%), thanks to having a real job (not a graduate student stipend) and working real hard at it. but i had an idea of how to dip back into the lower tax bracket by saving more for retirement.
say i have $40,000 of taxable income this year. the 25% tax bracket starts at $34,000. i figured that if i opened a retirement account that uses pre-tax dollars (like an individual 401k), i could claim that deduction. if i contributed $6,001 to that fund, i'd deduct that and have a taxable income of $33,999, putting me in the 15% tax bracket. instead of owing 25% of $40,000 (which is $10,000), i'd owe 15% of $33,999 (which is $5,100). i'd have locked up $6,001 to save $4,900.
i asked some people about this scheme.
i read some money blogs (investing for retirement, frugality, etc.) and decided to ask one of them about my scheme. he wrote a blog post answering my question (and renamed me), but didn't really address the scheminess of my scheme. sure, it's great to save more for retirement, and it doesn't make much sense to have two iras (a roth and a traditional), but would it really reduce my tax burden so dramatically? no.
i didn't understand how tax brackets work. i thought that i'd pay 15% of all my $33,999 taxable income (total=$5,100) or 25% of all my $34,000 taxable income (total=$8,500), with no middle ground. but it's not like that. everybody pays 10% on the first $8,375, then 15% on the next ($34,000-$8,375=) $25,625, then 25% on any amount over that, and so forth.
so if i had carried out my scheme, my tax burden (on $33,999) would be $4,681. without opening the new retirement account, i'd have a taxable income of $40,000, and a tax burden of $6,181. it would really only save me $1,500, which is what you'd expect from a $6,000 deduction in the 25% tax bracket.
i realize this may be jibberish. the point is that there isn't much to be gained (or lost) by jumping tax brackets. it's not that big a deal.
i'll probably open a 401k anyway. it doesn't hurt to save money when possible.


text:
Cmc Rope Rescuing Manual is good choice for you that looking for nice reading experience. We hope you glad to visit our website. Please read our description and our privacy and policy page.
Finally I get this ebook, thanks for all these Cmc Rope Rescuing Manual can get now!

lowercased:
cmc rope rescuing manual is good choice for you that looking for nice reading experience. we hope you glad to visit our website. please read our description and our privacy and policy page.
finally i get this ebook, thanks for all these cmc rope rescuing manual can get now!


text:
1902, 1907, 1909 Lincoln 1c AU / Unc.
1991 $1 Silver Eagle Unc.
2001 $1 Silver Eagle Unc.

lowercased:
1902, 1907, 1909 lincoln 1c au / unc.
1991 $1 silver eagle unc.
2001 $1 silver eagle unc.


text:
Hartford-born emcee BillySwagga brings explosive energy to the mic. Pairing street sensibility with dance floor ready tracks, BillySwagga (nee Trickee) has peformed at notable venues including Mohegan Sun Casino (Connecticut), Frontline Las Vegas, Club New York (New York City), and the XL Center in Hartford, where he opened for The Hot Boyz.
Frankie Nunez gave BillySwagga an early but hard hitting break; putting him on a multi-city promotional tour. BillySwagga’s musical sensibilities come through on his tracks. He was a student of violin, piano, and African dance (Yabo) as well as a longtime songwriter.
Eager for the craft of making Hip-Hop and Urban Dance music, BillySwagga is currently working with top Urban producer Chasebeats on a limited edition release which he will follow with an album. His current singles, “We Goin Get That” and “You No What I Want” are picking up listens on Reverb Nation.

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hartford-born emcee billyswagga brings explosive energy to the mic. pairing street sensibility with dance floor ready tracks, billyswagga (nee trickee) has peformed at notable venues including mohegan sun casino (connecticut), frontline las vegas, club new york (new york city), and the xl center in hartford, where he opened for the hot boyz.
frankie nunez gave billyswagga an early but hard hitting break; putting him on a multi-city promotional tour. billyswagga’s musical sensibilities come through on his tracks. he was a student of violin, piano, and african dance (yabo) as well as a longtime songwriter.
eager for the craft of making hip-hop and urban dance music, billyswagga is currently working with top urban producer chasebeats on a limited edition release which he will follow with an album. his current singles, “we goin get that” and “you no what i want” are picking up listens on reverb nation.


text:
To mark his 37th birthday, Bobi Wine went on a charity drive, visiting different places to make donations. He visited Mengo based Sanyu Babies home and a hospital in Kasangati, among other places. That was his plan. His friends other plans for him. He was treated to a surprise birthday party at DNA Lounge in Kololo.
The party was attended by his friends in the music business and politicians. People were requested to take off their red berets so as to avoid turning a birthday into a political rally. MP’s who attended were to told to restrain from making political statements. It was therefore dance, eating cake, and taking selfies with the birthday boy.

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to mark his 37th birthday, bobi wine went on a charity drive, visiting different places to make donations. he visited mengo based sanyu babies home and a hospital in kasangati, among other places. that was his plan. his friends other plans for him. he was treated to a surprise birthday party at dna lounge in kololo.
the party was attended by his friends in the music business and politicians. people were requested to take off their red berets so as to avoid turning a birthday into a political rally. mp’s who attended were to told to restrain from making political statements. it was therefore dance, eating cake, and taking selfies with the birthday boy.


text: With Noori Travel & Tours, the majority of our Umrah packages include flights from Heathrow airport. All our Hajj packages have flights from Heathrow airport. To help you find the latest status information for flights arriving / departing at Heathrow, please view the times below.

lowercased: with noori travel & tours, the majority of our umrah packages include flights from heathrow airport. all our hajj packages have flights from heathrow airport. to help you find the latest status information for flights arriving / departing at heathrow, please view the times below.