Abstract:
Understanding customer's attitudes toward advertising has been one of the purposes of
advertisers. Advertisements that are effective in conveying its messages to audiences can
promote and construct mindfulness on the organization's offerings. The purpose of this
research is to determine the attitudes towards advertising of certain controversial products on
Facebook in the western province of Sri Lanka. Three ethnic groups (Sinhala, Tamil, and
Muslim) were selected and three controversial products were used in the study. The attitudes
are measured in terms of advertising likability and dislikability to determine the overall level
oflikable and dislikable attitude towards Facebook advertising of controversial products.
The research focus on two objectives; to measure the level of attitude with regard to
controversial products advertising on television among different ethnic groups and to identify
if different ethnic groups hold different viewpoints regarding advertising of such
controversial products. A model was developed to measure the level of attitude by using
advertising likability and dislikability indicators with the use of randomly selected
controversial products, specifically Female Hygiene, Female Underwear and Political
advertisement. A sample of 384 respondents was used to collect information and quota
sampling method was used.
Based on the results, it was identified that ad likability is shown for female hygiene product
advertisements and ad dislikability shown for political advertisements and female
