Department of Psychology, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany.
PLoS One. 2019 Feb 15;14(2):e0212419. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0212419. eCollection 2019.
Global investments in online advertising rise quickly but internet users often avoid looking at ads due to established banner blindness. Demographic targeting is expected to overcome this tendency by attracting users' attention to more self-relevant ad content. However, little is known about the effect of demographically targeted versus non-targeted ads on users' actual attention allocation during exposure to webpages. The present study aimed to further fill this empirical gap by clarifying whether demographic targeting attracts visual attention and to exploratively examine whether it also affects brand attitude and website evaluation, as suggested by previous studies. Eye tracking data revealed that demographic targeting can have medium- to large-sized effects on several eye movement parameters when internet users are in a free-viewing mode. In contrast, demographic targeting did not influence brand attitude and website evaluation. We conclude that attention for personally relevant advertisement can be strong. However, attention, although being a necessary condition for subsequent judgment formation according to the model of human information processing, is not sufficient to elicit positive effects at the level of subjective judgments.
全球在线广告投资增长迅速，但由于长期存在的 banner blindness（广告屏蔽）现象，互联网用户经常避免观看广告。人口统计学定位有望通过吸引用户关注更具自我相关性的广告内容来克服这种趋势。然而，对于在浏览网页时，人口统计学定位广告与非定位广告对用户实际注意力分配的影响，我们知之甚少。本研究旨在通过澄清人口统计学定位是否吸引视觉注意力，并探索性地检验它是否像之前的研究所表明的那样，也会影响品牌态度和网站评价，来进一步填补这一经验空白。眼动追踪数据显示，当互联网用户处于自由浏览模式时，人口统计学定位对几个眼动参数具有中等到较大的影响。相比之下，人口统计学定位并不影响品牌态度和网站评价。我们的结论是，个人相关广告的注意力可能很强。然而，根据人类信息处理模型，注意力虽然是后续判断形成的必要条件，但不足以在主观判断层面产生积极影响。
