Educational Recruitment Ads:

Print ads remain an important element of educational recruitment advertising, and, as such, provide an important focus for on-going research. Although excellent advice on the creation of such ads is available in the literature, there still remain areas about which additional insight is sorely needed. Arguably, one such area centers around the topic of 'style' (i.e., how something is said rather than what is said) and its potential effect on how student recruits may perceive and react to recruitment ads. Consequently, the study reported here addresses this very topic. Specifically, this study tested reader response to recruitment ads of identical content but written in eight different styles. Our results suggest that certain styles, independently and in combination, do affect readers' perceptions along such lower-order assessment dimensions as ad interest, appeal, believability, and clarity, yet do not differentially affect much broader, overall measures such as overall attitude toward the ad or intent to respond. Such findings carry substantial implications for recruitment ad copywriters.