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The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of personal relevance, source credibility and advertising appeal type on the emotional and cognitive processing of a direct to consumer pharmaceutical ad for a meningitis vaccine.

A 2 × 2 experiment was used, and path analysis was undertaken to test the hypotheses.

Resultant models indicated that unvaccinated (more at risk) and vaccinated (less at risk) participants are persuaded through different pathways. More specifically, vaccinated participants rely more on message credibility than creative strategy to form their cognitive evaluation of the message, whereas non-vaccinated subjects’ cognitive evaluations of the message depend on creative strategy (advertising appeal type) more than message credibility. Differences between individuals who were certain of the vaccine status and those who were not certain of their vaccine status were also apparent. Implications and areas for future research are also presented.

When using direct to consumer pharmaceutical ad for a vaccine, advertisers should take into account the perceived risk level of and relevance to audience members.

Personal relevance and risk are issues which impact the effectiveness of different types of advertising appeals, but less prior research has focused on this aspect of the target audience for direct to pharmaceutical vaccine advertisements.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the communication styles on the web sites of a random sample of the top American corporations and non‐profit organizations. By revisiting the traditional approach to understanding strategic communication, the four models of public relations provide insights into the direction and nature of organizational communication.

A random sample of Fortune 500 (n=180) and Philanthropy 400 (n=170) was conducted. Although public relations research has never measured internet communication using the four models, the researchers created original scales to measure their web performance.

The research reveals that both corporations and non‐profits have strong preferences for using one‐way communication on their web sites. However, both groups moderately incorporated two‐way communication practices as corporations were more likely to use two‐way research practices and non‐profits were more likely to engage in conversations online.

This research examines organizational communication by returning to a previous method of analysis that has been cast aside by current scholars. However, assessing communication from the models of public relations perspective provides insights that current research strategies have not provided because they assume two‐way communication is the preferred form of communication.