Industry Partnerships:

Want to work with us?

Whether you're an advertiser, public relations firm, public health advocate, journalist, or political strategist, the PRIME Lab can inform the process of crafting effective messages with valid and reliable scientific research. We are always interested in exploring potential industry partnerships, so please feel free to contact us to discuss your research questions.

What do we do?

Our research explores how different features of media messages affect the way people think, feel, and act.

What messages can we study?

We define messages in terms of the information they carry rather than the box in which they come. Therefore, we can study any message that contains an audio, visual, or interactive stream of information, as well as messages that combine these streams.

Here are some examples of questions we've asked in recent research:

How does the combination of fear- and disgust-eliciting imagery affect arousal and attention to anti-smoking PSAs?
Does the number of options presented in an online news website affect how much cognitive effort people spend reading a news article?
Is brand attitude enhanced by branded videogames (advergames)?
How do political adwatches impact judgments of both candidates and news organizations?
When placing a multi-page ad in an online newspaper, does changing the copy from page to page affect attention and memory for the ad?
Are Clio Award-winning ads more compelling than related non-award winning ads?
How do production features (i.e. direct address, videographics, emotional tone) of direct-to-consumer (DTC) pharmaceutical ads affect cognition and emotion?
How does the ability to control the onset of a message (interactivity) affect attention, arousal, and pleasantness?

What can we measure?

We can measure many different things using psychophysiological, behavioral, and self-report methods. Here are some concepts that we are capable of exploring in any particular study:

Attention
Recognition memory
Pleasantness
Brand attitude
Cognitive effort
Arousal
Recall memory
Unpleasantness
Attitude toward an ad
Purchase intention

What are our qualifications?

We have over 20 years combined experience conducting media effects research. We've been trained at two of the most active media studies labs in the country (Indiana/Stanford). Our research has been published in the leading peer-reviewed journals in our field:

We are also active in the prominent professional organizations in our field. We attend their conferences annually, presenting our own research as well as staying up to date with the state of the art.

Finally, we are supported by the outstanding students of the Missouri School of Journalism, the world's first journalism school.

I've got a particular message/tactic that I'd like to test. Can you do this for me?

Absolutely. Please contact us and we'll be happy to discuss your interests.

PRIME Lab
176 Gannett Hall
Missouri School of Journalism
University of Missouri
Columbia, MO 65211
(573) 884-5127
primelab@missouri.edu