A model with four factors, and a source that does not last

Many advertisements, the notes begin, show an image that is not quite reality, and that looks as if one ought to pile up wealth in just that way; the effect, they write, is a blow to a person’s self-esteem and to satisfaction with life. Advertising, in this telling, can stir up a dissatisfaction with one’s own reality, and become a thing that lowers how satisfied a life feels.

Hovland’s model, they write, is a theory about identifying the particular factors that work in persuasive communication, and about adjusting an audience’s positive or negative state of mind. If the media deliver a message persuasively and effectively, he held, they can change the attitude of the people who receive an advertisement. The factors he named are the source of the persuasive information, the information itself, the method and the medium of the persuasive communication, and the person being persuaded. Later experiments, they add, showed that the credibility of a source does not last long in the course of persuasion. As time passes, and a parting of information from its source takes place, people decide their attitude more from the information itself. Those findings, the notes say, are still drawn on today when a model or a leading role is chosen in media marketing, in advertising, and in the making of films.

Shinhan Bank, May 2021, and the line “we lean our hearts”

As a case, they take a television advertisement made in the six months before the notes were written: Shinhan Bank’s ad of May 2021, with a new advertising model, the actor Cho Seung-woo, and the story line “we lean our hearts.” The bank, they write, said it would lean its heart toward customers and actively support the growth of firms that were shaping changes in daily life and in industry, and that it was presenting a reliable advertisement. The writer reads the ad as one that applies, above all, the method and the medium of persuasion, and the person being persuaded.

Shinhan Bank, they write, was established to set up a credit system efficiently for individuals and for firms, and stands firmly as one of the country’s five widely known major banks; other banks, they add, had lately been managing customers more actively, and that would have given Shinhan much to think about. What the bank arrived at, in this reading, was a way of having a “reliable person” introduce how customers would be supported, and how a customer who had actually been supported could be given an image. The short running time of the ad is used to show a story of care for the customer, so that people who had felt a bank to be distant might feel it a little closer, and might take in the hope that they themselves could be such a case. Cho Seung-woo was chosen, the writer thinks, as a model with a good reputation and a clean image, someone who could persuade many people. He had lately been active in a drama as well, and had long kept a good image in the theatre and in other work; he is, they write, one of the representative Korean actors who appear to an advertising audience in a positive light. His saying, on screen, that the bank leans its heart toward the customer is judged likely to work well on many people, and to give a positive image to someone still choosing a bank.

Attraction, a fit with the product, and a date left in 2021

Attraction, they write, is a psychological pull toward a product or a person, and a positive force; in an advertisement that uses a model, the model’s attraction has an important effect on the ad’s eventual result. Favor is a feeling that arises from the looks or the behavior of a model one likes; familiarity is how widely the model is already known through exposure, and whether consumers feel close to that person. When a firm advertises a new product, a model with a fresh, bright image can, if that image works positively on how consumers see the ad, have a large effect. If the model’s image and the product’s image do not match, the effect will be low; if they do, the effect can be larger. Advertising itself, they add, is in its first function a marketing tool that carries, and delivers, the information a producer or a seller wants to say to the consumer. People tend to buy what looks good, and to think that what is beautiful is also good. When model and product form a positive image together, persuasion comes more easily, and attraction can lead on to a purchase.

Today’s media advertising, the writer concludes, looks for a way to raise a positive effect by using a positive model, and firms often put forward an entertainer the consumer already likes, in order to change the consumer’s attitude toward a brand. Shinhan, in this reading, used Cho Seung-woo’s exemplary image, and a form of marketing a little different from older television ads, in the hope of making a new change in the consumer’s mind. The campaign is left where the notes place it, in May 2021, and is not recast as a later official campaign. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes’ account of Hovland’s persuasion model, including the May 2021 Shinhan Bank advertisement with Cho Seung-woo

Last updated: 14 November 2026