Retain viewer’s attention on banner ad by manipulating information type of the content

摘要

The influence of phenomenon like Banner blindness and Habituation has weakened researchers’ efforts to highlight the effect of adding salient visual features to ads. On the other hand, many studies discussed advertising attention on the basis of individual pages, neglecting the fact that most ads reside on one of a sequence of webpages that a viewer continuously reads. Therefore, our study discussed advertising attention from a different perspective, switching focus to the information type and their influence on attention in a sequence of webpages. This study, extended from our previous study, in which we found user attention to advertisement to drop sharply beyond the initial page, planned to investigate if it is possible to dishabituate users and enhance viewer‘s attention on banner ads by manipulating the information type of a sequence of content. We found that viewer’s attention on ads can be prolonged on subsequent pages with a rudimentary stimulus variation to content order and without changing any visual design feature of the ad itself, which is prone to the crippling effects of banner blindness and habituation, and that the image-based content inserted between pages of text-based content plays an important role in raising overall attention to advertisement.