University of Minnesota Researcher Rohini Ahluwalia Finds Web Advertising May Be More Effective Than You Think
MINNEAPOLIS, MN (2/27/2007) – Advertising is big business and Internet advertising is growing by leaps and bounds. But, do banner ads work? Even if people are not attending to them?
In the June 2007 Journal of Consumer Research in apaper entitled “An Examination of Different Explanations for the Mere Exposure Effect,” Rohini Ahluwalia, Professor of Marketing at the Carlson School of Management, investigates the processes underlying people’s reactions to banner ads on the Internet. Along with her co-authors Xiang Fang and Surendra Singh, Ahluwalia shows that when a stimulus is made just accessible to the individual’s perception it might be more effective than advertisers think.
“The mere exposure effect is the finding that repeated exposure to a stimulus, without giving people any information about it, leads to enhanced liking,” Ahluwalia says. “That stimulus could be a variety of things, even a face, a symbol, a logo, a tune, a rhythm, or a color.”
Ahluwalia and her coauthors find that familiarity with the stimulus makes people more “fluent” at processing it, and that fluency makes people think they must like it. They also found that consumers tend to have a relatively high level of tolerance for repeated exposure to banner ads. In fact, even after study participants were exposed to an ad 20 times, banner ads did not show any “wear-out effects.”
What does this mean for marketers? That it is good news if web surfers keep their eyes open and their hands still. “Most online advertisers judge the effectiveness of ads through click-through rates, but they might be overemphasizing the importance of that method,” Ahluwalia says. She and her team concluded that, even when there is no click-through on a banner ad, the message still gets through.
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