Banner blindness has a varied history. Common understanding is that banner ads are not seen. The first research into banner blindness determined that people had learned to avoid seeing banner ads. This was later confirmed by eye-tracking studies, which show that as people become more experienced with the web, their pattern of eye movements indicates they learn to avoid looking at banner ads. This phenomena has become known as "banner blindness." However, the fact that people do not focus on banner ads does not necessarily mean the ad is not affecting them. Just as there is research to show that unnoticed exposure to ads in the real world still affects brand recognition and response, research is emerging to show the same phenomena occurs with regard to banner ads.
While we may learn not to focus our eyes directly on an ad, it is still visible within our peripheral vision, and it has an impact from there. In November 2009, a researcher in France, Franck Largeault, took this research one step further, examining how much impact unnoticed banner ads have, and whether different banner designs have different effects. The results are stunningly clear-cut and have strong implications for ad design.
Largeault and his research
Franck Largeault's research formed his dissertation for a Master of Science at Reims Management School in France. His website provides video presentations in English and French of his research. If you're interested in this sort of thing, I recommend you watch the full 15-minute presentation. Largeault's experimental design is simple yet elegant, and his conclusions are easy to follow and unmistakably clear.
Early banner blindness studies were, in my opinion, suspect because they used ridiculously small sample sets, often no more than a dozen subjects. It is difficult to argue that an extrapolation from 12 people to the entire population is statistically valid. However, Largeault used a sample of more than 300 subjects, so his results should be statistically valid. In fact, it may be one of the largest studies into banner blindness ever.
Signal detection theory and banners
The best explanations for banner blindness come from Signal Detection Theory, which explains how people can distinguish noise from signal in a jumbled environment. The classic example is of standing at a noisy party. You are able to tune out all the other conversations so you only hear the person speaking to you. Yet, if someone mentions your name in one of those tuned-out conversations, you'll notice it instantly. Signal Detection Theory goes into the processes by which we can tune sensory input out of our consciousness, yet still detect relevant data in the "noise" we have tuned out.
The fact that we can suddenly notice important information within a stream of sensory data that we are not conscious of indicates our brains must be processing that data on some level. Experiments into sensory thresholds have shown there is no limit to how fine-tuned this processing is. Neither is there a limit to how little sensory input we can detect within the stream. Under the correct circumstances, we can detect a signal that affects only a single receptor in the eye (or ear) from amongst a mass of sensory stimulation.
Whether we detect something within the sensory stream or not is largely dependent upon psychological factors. These involve a balancing act between the penalty for missing relevant signals, the reward for correctly detecting them, and the penalty for mistakenly identifying noise as meaningful signal.
When surfing the web, the penalty for treating irrelevant content as important is fairly high. It breaks concentration, disrupts reading, makes page layout confusing, and generally makes surfing harder and slower. People on the web are in an active, goal-oriented behavior mode, unlike TV, where people are in a passive consumption mode. As such, web users typically find themselves searching for relevant data among pages littered with irrelevant content. For example, many newspaper websites allocate more screen space to advertising than to copy (just as they do in print). Thus, effective web surfing means learning to tune out irrelevant screen space to focus on the zones of interest. We see this pattern in eye-tracking studies. New users to the web tend to move their eyes over the whole screen. As their experience develops, the range of their eye movements reduces, focusing more on the center and left-hand side of the web page.
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