Effect of animation in banner ads

Abstract

For an advertising message to be most effective, both consumer attention and cognitive processing are equally important. This paper investigates the effectiveness of Internet banner advertising in terms of visual attention and memory by measuring users’ actual eye movement with an eye-tracking device, and examines the moderating role of animation, which is one of the most popular attention-attracting tools. The first study demonstrates the effect of animation in banner ads on visual attention and then analyzes the effect of visual attention on explicit and implicit memory. Contrary to expectations, animated banner ads attracted less visual attention than static ads. The positive effect of visual attention on explicit memory, however, was found as expected. Although more than half of the participants could not recognize the advertised brand, the banner ads were registered in their implicit memory and influenced their attitude toward the brand. Fixation frequency had no effect on explicit memory whereas it did positively influence the attitude toward the advertised brand. Longer gaze duration appeared to promote explicit memory while average fixation duration negatively affected the attitude toward the brand. Meanwhile, animation was found to undermine the effect of visual attention on recognition by creating higher cognitive load. Findings from this study show how the theory of visual attention and mere exposure effects can be applied in the context of Internet advertising. The second study investigates the effects of Internet advertising repetition on visual attention and memory and the moderating role of animation on these effects. The results showed that users’ gaze duration significantly decreased with advertising repetition, but despite this rapid decline in visual attention, recognition rate rose with up to three repeated exposures. Recognition rate after eight exposures, however, did not show a significant difference from that after three exposures, whic...