استفاده از P3a به منظور میزان توجه اتوماتیک به تبلیغات تعاملی تلویزیون

This paper is the first step to an understanding of how engagement with interactive television advertisements may increase the relevancy of a brand and therefore facilitate the automatic processing of the brand’s logo (measured via the P3a) after viewing the advertisement, compared to non-interactive television ads. Event-related potentials (ERPs) and attitudes were measured in response to advertisement-specific brands. ERP latencies and self-report measures were analysed with mixed design analysis of variance. P3a latency decreased for the brands associated with the longer interactive ads, but remained stable for the brands associated with the normal ads and increased for the control brands. This indicates that automatic attention was greater for those brands which were associated with the longer Dedicated Advertiser Location (DAL) interactive ads in the ad reel. The findings of this analysis suggest that brands associated with interactive ads do have more attention automatically allocated to them.

A key feature of the changing television landscape is the fragmentation of audiences across a growing number of broadcast networks and media platforms, increasing the need for advertising that relies on viewer engagement rather than TV exposure alone. The conversion from analog to digital television provides an opportunity for new ad formats, including interactive TV ads, which allow viewers to increase their engagement with advertised brands. This paper is the first step to an understanding of how engagement with interactive television advertisements may increase the relevancy of a brand and therefore facilitate the automatic processing of the brand’s logo (measured via the P3a), compared to non-interactive television ads.

The findings of this study suggest that brands associated with longer interactive advertisements (DAL advertisements) do have attention automatically and therefore more rapidly allocated to them because P3a latency was shorter in response to the brands associated with that particular ad model. However, while these brands were processed faster, they were not perceived more positively. In fact, there was evidence that the longer-duration interactive experience actually reduced the favourability of attitudes toward the ad and the brand. The lack of support for our expectation that longer-duration interactive advertisements would be rated more favourably compared to shorter-duration interactive ads and normal ads was surprising but not unexplained. While Sicilia et al. (2005) found a positive evaluation of both product and website during interactivity in their study investigating interactivity on the Web, their interactivity was restricted to low and medium levels of control over the information flow. Ariely (2000) found detrimental effects, when cognitive load exceeded capacity, on the ability to utilize information presented in a high information control scenario. Perhaps this finding is related to our unexpected result : the cognitive effort required to interact with the DAL ads was too great and therefore negatively impacted on attitudes toward the brands and advertisements. However, in our study, interactivity was forced, so the effects of increased control on capacity could only have been imagined. Another possibility is that the long duration of the forced interactivity negatively impacted on participant attitudes towards both the advertisement and the brand, while at the same time providing plenty of opportunities for rehearsal of brand information, which would have facilitated the processing of brand information. Future studies should use a ‘free will interactivity’ paradigm to disentangle and further clarify these effects. Interactive television advertisements have been found to increase purchase intention in a naturalistic lab setting (Reading, Bellman, Varan, & Winzar, 2006) when the interactivity was voluntary.