The influence of banner advertisements on attention and memory: human faces with averted gaze can enhance advertising effectiveness

Research suggests that banner advertisements used in online marketing are often overlooked, especially when positioned horizontally on webpages. Such inattention invariably gives rise to an inability to remember advertising brands and messages, undermining the effectiveness of this marketing method. Recent interest has focused on whether human faces within banner advertisements can increase attention to the information they contain, since the gaze cues conveyed by faces can influence where observers look. We report an experiment that investigated the efficacy of faces located in banner advertisements to enhance the attentional processing and memorability of banner contents. We tracked participants’ eye movements when they examined webpages containing either bottom-right vertical banners or bottom-centre horizontal banners. We also manipulated facial information such that banners either contained no face, a face with mutual gaze or a face with averted gaze. We additionally assessed people’s memories for brands and advertising messages. Results indicated that relative to other conditions, the condition involving faces with averted gaze increased attention to the banner overall, as well as to the advertising text and product. Memorability of the brand and advertising message was also enhanced. Conversely, in the condition involving faces with mutual gaze, the focus of attention was localised more on the face region rather than on the text or product, weakening any memory benefits for the brand and advertising message. This detrimental impact of mutual gaze on attention to advertised products was especially marked for vertical banners. These results demonstrate that the inclusion of human faces with averted gaze in banner advertisements provides a promising means for marketers to increase the attention paid to such adverts, thereby enhancing memory for advertising information

Consumer Perception of Online Advertising - The Effects of Animation, Ad Characteristics, Repetition and Task Relevancy on Attention and Memory

Prior advertising research on advertising perception models has mainly focused on effects that occur after consumers have been exposed to advertising stimuli. Little research has examined how consumers are exposed to advertising and the quality of visual attention during advertising exposure. This doctoral dissertation examines how consumers allocate their visual attention to online ads and how consumers memorize ads in different viewing conditions. More precisely, the dissertation focuses on how ad format and location, animation, repetition, abrupt onsets, and task relevancy affect attention to ads and memory performance. The thesis employs theories of cognitive psychology, visual marketing and consumer behavior, advertising persuasion models and computer science and applies experimental methodologies such as eye tracking besides consumers' self-reported measures. The thesis consists of four essays. Essay 1 introduces a review of relevant theory and eye tracking methodology for online advertising research. The next three essays present experimental studies. Essay 2 investigates the effects of ad format and animation on attention and memory. Essay 3 examines the effects of repetition of ads on memory. Essay 4 investigates how animation, ad format and abrupt onsets of ads affect reading performance, and how online ads are perceived during free browsing compared to an instructed reading task. Our findings indicate that attention and memory for ads were significantly affected by consumers' intentions, ad characteristics and web page contents. Consumers are more likely to be attracted by ads when browsing web sites freely without a special task. Ad characteristics, such as animation and ad format interact and influence differently on attention and memory performance for ads depending on the ad's location on a page and the surrounding page content. The thesis also tested the effects of repetition of ads as a potential strategy to improve memory for ads. A significant positive effect was found already at rather low levels of repetition. Moreover, we also tested consumers' attention to abrupt onsets of ads. We registered a significant increase of attention to abrupt onsets of ads as compared with permanent ads especially during free browsing of web pages. This thesis increases our knowledge of the role and type of ad exposure on consumers' attention by evaluating the effectiveness of advertising exposure in dynamic online environment. This research is also the first attempt to evaluate the applicability of the primary eye tracking measures for online advertising. For advertisers, media traders and graphic designers this research proposes new strategies about how to adjust ad format and placement, animation and repetition to break through advertising clutter and reduce consumers' ad avoidance to develop stronger brand awareness and preferences

Conventions and mutual expectations — understanding sources for web genres

Genres can be understood in many different ways. They are often perceived as a primarily sociological construction, or, alternatively, as a stylostatistically observable objective characteristic of texts. The latter view is more common in the research field of information and language technology. These two views can be quite compatible and can inform each other; this present investigation discusses knowledge sources for studying genre variation and change by observing reader and author behaviour rather than performing analyses on the information objects themselves

FraudDroid: Automated Ad Fraud Detection for Android Apps

Although mobile ad frauds have been widespread, state-of-the-art approaches in the literature have mainly focused on detecting the so-called static placement frauds, where only a single UI state is involved and can be identified based on static information such as the size or location of ad views. Other types of fraud exist that involve multiple UI states and are performed dynamically while users interact with the app. Such dynamic interaction frauds, although now widely spread in apps, have not yet been explored nor addressed in the literature. In this work, we investigate a wide range of mobile ad frauds to provide a comprehensive taxonomy to the research community. We then propose, FraudDroid, a novel hybrid approach to detect ad frauds in mobile Android apps. FraudDroid analyses apps dynamically to build UI state transition graphs and collects their associated runtime network traffics, which are then leveraged to check against a set of heuristic-based rules for identifying ad fraudulent behaviours. We show empirically that FraudDroid detects ad frauds with a high precision (93%) and recall (92%). Experimental results further show that FraudDroid is capable of detecting ad frauds across the spectrum of fraud types. By analysing 12,000 ad-supported Android apps, FraudDroid identified 335 cases of fraud associated with 20 ad networks that are further confirmed to be true positive results and are shared with our fellow researchers to promote advanced ad fraud detectionComment: 12 pages, 10 figure

The Influence of Message and Audio Modalities in Augmented Reality Mobile Advertisements on Consumers\u27 Purchase Intention

Evidence shows that augmented reality (AR) technology is an effective advertising approach to raise a brand’s awareness, so many big brands implement AR into their marketing strategy. However, the effectiveness of AR mobile advertisements on consumers’ purchase intentions remains unclear. To fill this dearth in the literature, this study examined how message and audio modalities of AR mobile advertisements influenced consumers’ purchase intentions by surveying 120 participants in an online experiment. Based on the uses and gratifications perspective, this experiment manipulated the message type (emotional/factual) and audio-verbal appeal (present/absent) of AR advertisements to investigate their impact on consumers’ attitudes towards buying a watch. The results showed that audio-verbal appeal played a salient role in the emotional message to positively influence consumers’ perceived entertaining gratification and intention to buy the watch. However, the audio-verbal factual message negatively influenced consumers’ purchase intention and did not influence their perceived information gratification. Future research should test other multimedia such as images, video, or animations to better understand the interaction effect between AR mobile advertisements and consumers’ purchase intentions

Brand Identification and Advertisement Appreciation of Online, Print, and TV Advertisements

This study explores the effects of media type (including online, print, and TV), advertisement shape, and online animation level on advertising responses such as recall, recognition, attitude, and purchase intent. The study examined a set of 1636 surveys, each collecting consumer responses to an individual advertisement, conducted by the consumer research and consulting firm OTX Research. The findings showed that underlying the considered measures were two factors, brand identification and advertisement appreciation, and that media type and advertisement shape produced significant differences in these factors. While online advertisements had the highest brand identification, TV advertisements had the highest advertisement appreciation. Additionally, the three advertisement characteristics were able to effectively discriminate between high and low levels of these factors. The findings allow for intuitive explanations of how consumer engagement and sought experiences may be producing the comparative effects of online, print and TV advertisements

EyeScout: Active Eye Tracking for Position and Movement Independent Gaze Interaction with Large Public Displays

While gaze holds a lot of promise for hands-free interaction with public displays, remote eye trackers with their confined tracking box restrict users to a single stationary position in front of the display. We present EyeScout, an active eye tracking system that combines an eye tracker mounted on a rail system with a computational method to automatically detect and align the tracker with the user's lateral movement. EyeScout addresses key limitations of current gaze-enabled large public displays by offering two novel gaze-interaction modes for a single user: In "Walk then Interact" the user can walk up to an arbitrary position in front of the display and interact, while in "Walk and Interact" the user can interact even while on the move. We report on a user study that shows that EyeScout is well perceived by users, extends a public display's sweet spot into a sweet line, and reduces gaze interaction kick-off time to 3.5 seconds -- a 62% improvement over state of the art solutions. We discuss sample applications that demonstrate how EyeScout can enable position and movement-independent gaze interaction with large public displays