Media context: a literature review and research agenda

This paper takes the relationship between media context and advertising reception into renewed consideration. We build our argument on a literature review that analyses and classifies existing literature on media context into three different streams of research: editorial media context, total media context and experienced media context. The literature review shows there is a lack of qualitative research within media context studies. Therefore, the second part of the paper outlines the potential gain of method plurality in media context studies by adopting qualitative methods and suggests that reception analysis and media ethnography can provide new insights. The paper contributes to theory and practice by offering an overview of the existing knowledge of media contexts’ contextual influence on advertising processing and by offering a way forward that allows for method plurality.