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