Information Content of Television Advertising in China

A content analysis of 324 Chinese television commercials that appeared on Chinese national and local channels was conducted. The Resnik and Stern (1977) evaluation criteria were adopted to determine the level of advertising information content in television commercials. It was found that 58 per cent of the sampled commercials were classified as informative. The most frequently occurring information cues were performance, quality and components/contents. Non-durables and drug advertising was most informative while cigarette and liquor advertising was least informative. Information content was not dependent on characteristics of commercials like duration, broadcast day, time and channel.