The Attention Grabbing Salience of Viscerally Engaging Images

Abstract

Banner ads remain a core component of the marketing mix for companies in both the analog and digital domains. Consumers spend much of their time on websites, whether through mobile or desktop devices, and marketers need to target them where they are. Unfortunately, inattention blindness is a serious impediment to the effectiveness of banner advertising; consumers have become proficient at ignoring banners when they appear in areas predictably associated with advertising. Research has uncovered some strategies to overcome banner blindness, but many of these require customer analytics and can evoke privacy concerns. Others degrade the user experience by interfering with the user’s task. One possible alternative is to use innately salient advertising content, but there is a dearth of research investigating the effectiveness of this approach. The current study fills this gap with an empirical investigation using established, innately salient images in banner ads and a primary task that involved reading text articles that were either intrinsically interesting or boring. Eye-tracking was used to assess the impact on participants’ visual scan patterns and visual attention. The results were mixed. Participants’ visual attention was drawn to banner ads that contained sexually suggestive content, but not for other innately salient categories. The effect of the intrinsic salience of the content was complicated and requires further research to resolve.