Online Banner Actions

For many people, online banners are all about the click; the action, the drive through to the website to do more. This, in the past, has heavily influenced their design, with prominent call to actions to get that click. With the increase in rich media applications, a click-through becomes less necessary as much of the message can be delivered in the ad unit itself, without leading the user away from the site they are on. But a click is still required.

Considering that online ads, to me anyway, were the equivalent of TV commercials, the mass blast, looking for reach and frequency not engagement, the focus on action, as opposed to awareness, can be a little twisted. But as you can measure all of the clicks and actions online, the development of such metrics is not surprising.

Now there is a nice piece of research on what banner ads are actually doing to the mind, summarised in Ars Technica. The authors of the paper, Fang, Singh and Ahluwalia, were looking to see of banner ads acted in the same way as other subliminal exposures, enhancing the perception of the object even if there is no concious action to interact with the ad. They found that multiple exposures increased the positive feelings linearly whilst having no impact on the negative feelings.

There are apparently two models competing to explain this phenomenon. The first proposes that people will more readily assign positive properties to something that they can remember more readily. The second suggests that the processing of even minimal exposures can create an actual positive evaluation (for example, the conclusion that the item is not a threat). That positive affect then influences future evaluations.

Of the 2 models, it appears that the first is correct, it;s all about increasing the familiarity of the object/brand. However, when the subjects were asked to analyse their perceptions and disregard familiarity with the object, then the positive trend went away, indicating there is no real positive assessment and the object has to back up the perceptions with reality to maintain it.

For me, this research ties in with previous work I’ve read that indicates that exposure to both TV and online ads enhances the effectiveness of qualitative measures, such as awareness and intent to purchase more than one method alone. Increasing the exposure, even if you are not driving active consideration, has a positive effect. Does this mean your online creative has to reflect your offline? I’m not sure, not found anything yet that says that. But it is an interesting thing to ponder when planning what you are going to do online next.