اثرات انیمیشن و شکل بر ادراک و حافظه تبلیغات آنلاین

Based on a general framework of consumer perception and processing of advertising, this study examines the impact of animation and ad format on the attention and memorization of online ads. Consumer attention to a variety of real-world ads was measured with eye tracking and ad memory was assessed with recognition and recall tests. The results suggest that on average, animation had little or no effect on attention. We did nevertheless observe a strong interaction effect between animation and ad format, which suggests that the effect of animation is conditioned by ad format. Animation has a positive effect on attention to skyscrapers, but a negative one on attention to banners. As to memorization, animation improved recognition effects, but mainly for banners. Surprisingly, consumers could recognize ads without having looked at them, which suggests that online consumers are especially parsimonious in allocating their focal attention and memory resources to irrelevant ads when they are involved in other tasks.

Given the abundant information available on the web, it is important for practitioners and academics to understand how online consumers perceive and memorize online advertising. Consumers are exposed to online ads constantly during active use of online media, whether they are engaged in information search, entertainment, shopping, or exploration. A high number of ads in various formats on a single web page creates advertising clutter; it increases ad avoidance and reduces consumers' memory of online ads (Cho and Cheon, 2004, Ha and McCann, 2008 and McCoy et al., 2007). Online users' attitudes towards different ad formats vary and this affects ad viewing (Burns and Lutz 2006). When assessing online advertising effectiveness, it is therefore vital to investigate how online ad characteristics such as format and animation influence users' attention and memory. Research on the relative effectiveness of various online ad formats and on how people look at them is still in its infancy (Rayner and Castelhano 2008). The effectiveness of online ads has usually been measured by click-through rates. In the United States click-through rates have declined steadily from 7% in 1996 to approximately .1% in 2008 (Doubleclick 2009). Nevertheless, advertisers invest increasingly in online advertising even if the evidence of its effectiveness is equivocal. As online media revenues have become a dominant earning logic for many companies offering free services but selling media space, these firms try to maximize the number of ads on their sites, thus cluttering the advertisement environment for both advertisers and consumers (Ha and McCann 2008). Hence, online advertisers try to draw attention to their ads by means of a variety of advertising techniques such as animation.

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of animation and format on attention and memory for advertisements in real online environments. We presented web pages with authentic online ads to participants in order to examine the effects and the interaction between animation and format. Several methods were applied, including eye tracking, recognition memory test, and a two-high-threshold-model for correcting guessing strategies of participants. Questionnaires and qualitative observation including “think aloud” feedback and free recall were used as complementary methods. The Corsi block test was applied to measure how visual short-term memory capacity affects memory performance. The main results are the following. Animation had no substantial effect on attention, but this result was spurious since there was a strong interaction between animation and format: animated skyscrapers increased attention while animated banners decreased attention. Attention to ads varied in different experimental conditions. The most effective condition for attracting attention was when the skyscraper was animated and banner was static. Animated skyscrapers represented a more conspicuous stimulus on the page than banners and attracted bottom-up attention especially at the beginning of the experiment. Moreover, the reading task given to the participants required both sensorial and cognitive capacity and restricted attention to banners on the top of page which were perceived as more peripheral than vertically placed skyscrapers.