| Chapter 2: | Literature Review |
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exposed participants to a shampoo ad with either two different executions or two identical executions and found higher unaided and aided recall of the brand name when the ad executions were different than when they were the same. A significance of this study is that participants viewed the ad only two times, thereby demonstrating that ad variation can have significant effects even in low-frequency situations. Using television commercials, Singh, Linville, and Sukhdial (1995) also found that a varied format resulted in significantly greater effects than a non-varied format when commercials were shown twice.
According to the differential attention hypothesis, when people are exposed to the same ad multiple times, their attention level progressively declines due to a decrease in motivation to process (Unnava, & Burnkrant, 1991). Consequently, repeating the same ad can result in inferior performance in memory because of less attention and motivation to process the information. However, if an ad is varied, people may pay more attention because varied ads are processed as new stimuli resulting in lower levels of tedium. Therefore, according to the differential attention hypothesis, varied ads can induce greater attention as well as superior memory.
Few empirical studies have employed the differential attention paradigm in the ad variation context. Using television commercials and CONPAAD equipment in both a laboratory and a theater situation, Grass and Wallace (1969) investigated whether varied commercials lead to superior attention and recall than non-varied commercials. These researchers found that the varied commercials not only produced superior attention and memory but also resulted in less wear-out than non-varied commercials. It is expected that the effects of ad variation on memory is same in the web advertising environment as well. Therefore, the following hypothesis is proposed: