The NextStage CRO debuts exciting new research about ad placement and warns that what media planners don't know may be killing them!

In this article:
Introduction
How attention works 
What's important to someone depends on what's happening in their life
A skyscraper misadventure 
Ads that work well within pages 
When ads go wrong 
Tarred by the broad brush 
What media buyers don't know is killing them 
Let's stop talking about "behavioral" 
Summary and bibliography 

Have you ever wondered why, when you're walking down a street in a familiar city, one thing catches your eye and another doesn't? Have you ever noticed how much more you see driving down the street when you're a passenger in a car than when you're the driver? How come people unfamiliar with rural settings wake at every sound and people experiencing a city for the first time lie awake listening to the unfamiliar cityscape?

Let me share a secret with you: everything catches your eye and ear -- indeed all your senses -- whether you're familiar with it or not. You see and respond to everything you see regardless of where and when you see it. Ditto to everything you hear. As one of my mentors told me, "People cannot not respond. Sometimes that response is to ignore the stimulus."

This article is about getting people to focus on a stimulus, specifically advertising on a web page. We'll be using five IAB ad placements for our examples:

• 728x90 Leaderboard at the top of the page
• 160x600 Wide Skyscraper and 120x600 Skyscraper both at the right of the page
• 300x250 Medium Rectangle and 180x150 Rectangle both in the lower right of the page

We need to understand a little about what triggers what kind of response -- ignoring or focusing of attention, retention and cognition -- to start. The neurologic mechanisms of response are the same if you're travelling down a street, hearing a sound or browsing a web page.

Some of what I'll be sharing is material from previous columns on the mind-eye-brain system and elsewhere on the mind-senses-brain system because catching people's eyes and ears -- hence their hearts, minds and pocketbooks -- is what advertising is about.

The next part of this article is going to explain some of the science involved in ad placement. Regular readers know NextStage doesn't come from a traditional advertising/marketing paradigm. Readers finding this article with no knowledge of NextStage need to be aware of this fact.

The information in this article comes from studies in neuroscience, neuroeconomics, neuromarketing, and a host of other disciplines NextStage regularly focuses on.

Once you understand how the mind-eye-brain system works, then you begin to understand that traditional best practices may not be best practices after all. An abridged bibliography appears at the end of this column and a complete bibliography can be found in my blog. The bibliography in my blog points to research done by NextStage and others, the bibliography at the end of this article only points to material that can be found on iMedia Connection.
 
Next: How attention works

Joseph Carrabis is CRO and founder of NextStage Evolution and NextStage Global and founder of KnowledgeNH and NH Business Development Network. He was recently selected as a senior research fellow and board advisor for the Society for New Communications Research. Read full bio.