Elsevier

Computers in Human Behavior

Volume 46, May 2015, Pages 202-209
Computers in Human Behavior

The effect of repetition in Internet banner ads and the moderating role of animation

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.01.008Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Animation plays a significant moderating role in Internet banner ads.

  • Across repetition, attention decreases with static ads but not with animated ones.

  • Across repetition, memory performance saturates slower for animated banner ads.

  • After repetitive brief exposures, attitude becomes more positive for animated ads.

Abstract

Many advertising repetition studies have demonstrated wear-out effects, and found several moderating variables. In the context of Internet banner ads, this study examines the effects of repetition on attention, memory, and attitude, and identifies the moderating role of animation. By analyzing data on users’ actual visual attention, we found attention wear-out occurs with static but not with animated banner ads, which consequently influences the downstream effects: Compared to a static banner ad, an animated ad barely attracts consumers’ attention initially, resulting in worse memory performance and attitude in the beginning. However, with repeated brief exposures, animated banner ads eventually catch up with the static ads on memory and generate even better performance in terms of attitude. To summarize, animations signal the users the existence of ads and lead to ad avoidance behavior, but after repetitive exposures they induce positive user attitude through the mere exposure effect. Both the theoretical and practical implications are explored for using animation on the banner ads.

Introduction

As more products become available in the market, consumers are exposed to more advertising. Yankelovich, market research firm, estimated that a consumer living in a city saw up to 5000 ad messages a day in 2007, compared with up to 2000 ad messages 30 years ago (Story, 2007). In this information-overloaded environment, the scarcest resource is people’s attention (Davenport & Beck, 2001). To attract consumers’ attention, advertisers try various methods, such as repetitive exposure of ads (Pechmann & Stewart, 1989) or the use of animation in ads (Kuisma, Simola, Uusitalo, & Oorni, 2010). A significant amount of the literature has addressed the effect of repetition in advertising, especially in the context of television commercials. Most studies argue that advertising repetition is essential for optimal effectiveness but that excessive repetition ultimately has negative effects, the wear-out effect. However, when viewers control the duration of their exposure to an advertisement, such as in the case of print advertising and Internet banner ads, a different response to advertising repetition can be seen (Pieters, Rosbergen, & Wedel, 1999); attention duration decreases significantly with advertising repetition and thus the expected negative effects on attitude do not appear.

Animation (simple Flash or GIF format) is one of the most popular attention-grabbing tools. In 2009, among all banner ad formats served via the DoubleClick platform, simple flash ads accounted for 54% whereas static ads accounted for 28% (DoubleClick, 2010). However, with accumulated Internet experience, people tend to develop a habit of avoiding animation, assuming that all are advertisements (Lapa, 2007). In the same vein, a number of recent studies have shown the negative effects of animation in banner ads on advertising effectiveness (e.g. Burke et al., 2005, Day et al., 2006, Hong et al., 2004, Hsieh et al., 2012, Kuisma et al., 2010, Lee and Ahn, 2012). Then, do these results imply that we should not use or reduce animation in banner ads? For static and animated banner ads, how will the effectiveness of banner ads be different and change with the advertising repetition?

To address these issues, this study adopts the eye-tracking approach to investigate the effect of animation in banner ads on attention and its downstream effects across advertising repetition. In particular, for the three types of wear-out effects (Pieters et al., 1999), the following questions are addressed and their implications are explored in this paper:

  • 1.

    Attention wear-out effect: Does attention decrease with banner ad repetition for static and animated banner ads?

  • 2.

    Learning wear-out effect: Does memory performance reach plateau due to banner ad repetition for static and animated banner ads?

  • 3.

    Acceptance wear-out effect: How does attitude toward the advertised brand change with banner ad repetition for static and animated banner ads?

This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 examines the theoretical background and presents the research hypotheses. Section 3 describes the research method and experimental procedure, and Section 4 discusses the results. Finally, Section 5 concludes with a summary of the research, contributions, limitations, and suggestions for future research.

Section snippets

Advertising repetition and wear-out effect

Previous research on advertising repetition has found an inverted U-shaped relationship between the number of exposures and advertising effectiveness (Berlyne, 1987, Cacioppo and Petty, 1979): Ads’ effectiveness increases during the initial phase of advertising repetition (wear-in) and then decreases with more repetition (wear-out). The second phase, wear-out, begins mostly with the fourth exposure (Pechmann & Stewart, 1989); in this phase, additional exposure has no significant effect on users

Eye-tracking approach

Psychological processes such as learning, activation, and attention are known to originate from physiological processes (Kroeber-Riel, 1979). Likewise, eye movement is known to be strongly and directly connected to visual attention and thus plays a central role in information processing and communication effectiveness (Kroeber-Riel, 1984, Wedel and Pieters, 2008). Because attention is not always active or conscious (Kellogg, 1980), physiological responses such as eye movements are considered

Attention to static vs. animated banner ads

Before testing the hypotheses, two eye-tracking measures were collected and analyzed: time to first fixation (time before the first fixation on banner ads) and the percentage of participants fixating on banner ads. While gaze duration is a measure of the ability to hold participants’ attention, time to first fixation along with the percent of participant’s fixation is said to be a good measure of the ability to attract attention, which is especially important when competition for visual

Discussion

Advertisers tend to expose an advertisement repeatedly in order to make sure a positive advertising effectiveness such as consumers’ product awareness. In the context of the Internet banner ads, the number of exposures increases further as users visit the same web pages repeatedly for a short period of time (Cockburn & McKenzie, 2001). This study investigates how the use of animation in banner ads influences the advertising effectiveness across repetition in terms of attention, memory, and

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2013S1A5B5A07049898).

References (61)

  • Aoki, H., & Itoh, K. (2000). Analysis of cognitive attitudes to commercial films on basis of eye tracking data. In...
  • W.B. Baker

    When can affective conditioning and mere exposure directly influence brand choice?

    Journal of Advertising

    (1999)
  • R. Batra et al.

    Affective responses mediating acceptance of advertising

    Journal of Consumer Research

    (1986)
  • G.E. Belch

    The effects of television commercial repetition on cognitive response and message acceptance

    Journal of Consumer Research

    (1982)
  • D.E. Berlyne

    Novelty, complexity, and hedonic value

    Perception and Psycholphysics

    (1987)
  • M. Burke et al.

    High-cost banner blindness: Ads increase perceived workload, hinder visual search, and are forgotten

    Transactions on Computer–Human Interaction

    (2005)
  • R. Burke et al.

    Competitive interference and consumer memory for advertising

    Journal of Consumer Research

    (1988)
  • J. Cacioppo et al.

    Effects of message repetition and position on cognitive response, recall, and persuation

    Journal of Personalty and Social Psychology

    (1979)
  • J. Cacioppo et al.

    Persuasiveness of communications is affected by exposure frequency and message quality: A theoretical and empirical analysis of persisting attitude change

    Current Issues and Research in Advertising

    (1980)
  • B.J. Calder et al.

    Television commercial wearout: An information processing view

    Journal of Marketing Research

    (1980)
  • S.L. Coates et al.

    Implicit memory and consumer choice: The mediating role of brand familiarity

    Applied Cognitive Psychology

    (2006)
  • J. Cohen

    Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences

    (1988)
  • C.S. Craig et al.

    Advertising wearout: An experimental analysis

    Journal of Marketing Research

    (1976)
  • T.H. Davenport et al.

    The attention economy: Understanding the new currency of business

    (2001)
  • R.-F. Day et al.

    The effect of Flash banners on multiattribute decision making: Distractor or source of arousal?

    Psychology and Marketing

    (2006)
  • DoubleClick (2010). 2009 year-in-review benchmarks....
  • d’Ydewalle, G., & Tamsin, F. (1993). On the visual processing and memory of incidental information: Advertising panels...
  • K. Goodrich

    Anarchy of effects? Exploring attention to online advertising and multiple outcomes

    Psychology and Marketing

    (2011)
  • K. Goodrich

    Effects of age and time of day on Internet advertising outcomes

    Journal of Marketing Communications

    (2013)
  • G.J. Gorn et al.

    Behavioral evidence of the effects of televised food messages on children

    Journal of Consumer Research

    (1982)
  • Cited by (46)

    • How placement affects brand preferences in advergames: A test of inhibition and facilitation processes during search

      2022, Computers in Human Behavior
      Citation Excerpt :

      Biased competition processes during search tasks challenge the perspective that brand placements in video games can automatically, by placement alone, improve attitudes to brands (Acar, 2007; Lee & Faber, 2007; Youn, 2019). The reasoning discussed previously indicates that positive effects of brand placements observable in other contexts (e.g., Lee et al., 2015; Matthes et al., 2012; Mrkva & Van Boven, 2020; Palcu et al., 2017) do not imply that similar effects occur in advergames. In advergames, contrary to passively watching a movie or newspaper, players have to continuously complete specific tasks.

    • Campaign contests

      2020, European Economic Review
    • Interface effects of online media on tourists' attitude changes

      2019, Tourism Management Perspectives
      Citation Excerpt :

      Pictures, which function as a major communication stimulus, are most commonly used to increase message vividness. Vivid messages should increase the level of information involvement (Lee, Ahn, & Park, 2015; Shaouf, Lü, & Li, 2016) versus less vivid messages. Involvement with tourism-related information varies based on the visual format (less vivid/vivid) of online messages.

    • A study of the effects of programmatic advertising on users’ concerns about privacy overtime

      2019, Journal of Business Research
      Citation Excerpt :

      Finally, in Stage 3 a paired samples t-test of the construct scores is performed (Johnson, Herrmann, & Huber, 2006). The investigation hypothesis for the longitudinal model which was used is justified after considering the following investigations of Choi, Park, and Jung (2018), Miralles-Pechuán et al. (2018), Lee (2017), McCoy, Everard, Galletta, and Moody (2017), Qin et al. (2017), Lee et al. (2015) and Xu, Peak and Prybutok (2015). Aguirre et al. (2015) prepare a model to study the differences of the users' opinions about online advertising personalization, and their concerns about Internet privacy.

    View all citing articles on Scopus
    1

    Present address.

    View full text