Current Issue Summary
September 2022 (Vol. 62, Issue 3)
Can Personalization or Creativity Reduce Banner Blindness? An Executive Functions Approach to Media and Creative Strategies
Advertising practitioners often turn to personalization-based media strategies to counter banner blindness. Such blindness is defined as the conscious or unconscious act of ignoring banner ads and other graphics that look like ads. Farzad Abedi and Scott Koslow (both at Macquarie University) challenge this practice in their work that suggests breakthrough, creativity-based strategies may be more effective in some situations.
When using personalization strategies to counter banner blindness, “the consumer’s decision-making can be likened to a train of thought traveling at some momentum toward a station that represents a purchase,” the authors write. “Consumers are considered so in control of their decision-making train of thought that if advertisers could merely pick off a few of them, that would be judged as a success.” An alternative to that method is highly creative advertising intended to “derail the whole decision-making train of thought.” The objective here is to influence a broad range of consumers so that “somewhere, awash in all that influence there is a subset of the right consumers being influenced at the right time—plus many others.”
Personalization requires nudging with the “right-advertisement/right-time” (RART) method. Using an “executive functions” framework, the study simulated RART by “asking consumers to undertake specific searches and then, half the time, delivered ads to them that displayed products for which they just searched.” By contrast the extreme creativity (XC) approach uses a highly creative ad to “do the hard work of gaining attention.”
The researchers differentiated between two train-of-thought speeds (goal-directed processing versus casual surfing) and showed the net influence of the two strategies on recall, recognition and affect toward both the ad and the brand. In the first experiment, participants searched two specific online stores for information about two products (one on each website) and were asked how likely they might be to buy the products as well as what factors influenced their purchase decision. In Experiment 2, eye tracking was used while participants viewed a version of a fictitious website about the Olympic Games. Recall, recognition and affects measures followed in a questionnaire.
Among the takeaways:
- Highly creative advertising improves attention to ads and brand attitudes, while personalization focuses on improving memory.
- When people are casually surfing the web, personalized strategies work better, but highly creative advertising is more effective when consumers are using media in a goal-directed way.
- In some instances, less creative ads can help brand attitudes “but it takes an unusually long period of attention to do that—time most consumers are unwilling to give.”