Abstract
This article describes a study involving 557 participants that investigated effects of respondents’ sociodemographic background on their rating of appeal and congruency of music in television commercials, with a focus on classical music. Though research indicates that there are connections between listeners’ musical preferences and their social backgrounds, and targeted advertising is premised on the notion that consumers can be divided and marketed to by sociodemographic categories, the results of the study suggest that sociodemographic background may not play a central role when it comes to the processing of music and images together in commercials, whether classical or other. In its use of SurveyMonkey’s Audience service to assemble participants, the study is exploratory in nature, suggesting a potential new resource for research on audiovisual media.
