The aim of this study was to evaluate if the introduction of a new advertising sector (woman-fashion or beauty) in a women’s magazine, which usually contained mainly one of these sectors, had a decreasing effect on explicit and implicit memory.

Twenty-two subscribers of a magazine which contains mainly beauty advertisings (group 1: Psychologies Magazine) were compared to 22 subscribers of a magazine which contains rather mainly fashion advertisings (group 2: Marie Claire). The experimental magazine which they had to read for 30 mn, was composed by the editorial content of the issue, but the advertisings were manipulated. Two explicit memory tasks (free recall and recognition) and two implicit memory tasks were used: a preference judgment and a semantic categorization (fashion/beauty).

The results indicated that free recall and recognition mean performances were similar for the two groups. An interaction between group and advertising sector was observed: the beauty sector was less recognized than the fashion sector in group 2, whereas recognition performance was equivalent in the two sectors in group 1. The semantic categorization was faster for target advertisements than for distractor advertisements for both sectors in group 1 and only for the usual sector (fashion) in group 2. Moreover, the preference test showed that fashion advertisements were preferred to beauty advertisements in both groups.

A decreasing effect of advertising sector novelty was found for group 2 but not for group 1, probably because for group 1, the new sector was preferred to the old one. These results indicate that preference modulates strongly the effect of novelty. Introducing a new advertising sector in a magazine seems to decrease the memorization of the advertisements except if the new sector is an appreciated sector