Does banner advertising still capture (some) attention? An eye tracking study

 ICORIA2022 - 20th International Conference on Research in Advertising

Online banner advertisements used to be a successful promotional tool. But quickly consumers started to ignore such form of advertising deliberately. However, companies continue investing in banner ad advertising. Hoping to cancel out attentional avoidance to ads, companies started to embed banners into the website content. But whether this strategy in fact leads to more attention paid to the ads, has been understudied. This study used a realistic-look webpage, a sports news website, with two tasks, reading the news and deciding what to see more to investigate how much visual attention measured via eye-tracking is given to banner ads embedded into the content space dependent on the task being performed. In addition, we investigated how attention, banner location, banner click, and banner recognition relate to each other. Our main finding was that banner ads are still largely disregarded by consumers when they are performing a focused task, such as reading some news. However, we found that it is not necessary to pay full attention to a banner ad to be able to recognize it afterward, even after one week of banner ad exposure.