| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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Schumann, Petty, & Clemons, 1990; Burnkrant, & Unnava, 1987). Some researchers (Unnava & Burnkrant, 1991) further suggest that even under low frequency conditions, a varied ad campaign can result in higher advertising effectiveness than an unvaried ad campaign repeated multiple times.
Researchers who have investigated wear-out effects in traditional media have proposed several frequency models including the inverted-U curve model (Berlyne, 1970; Pechmann & Stewart, 1988), the S-shaped model (Krugman, 1972), and the concave model (Sissors & Bumba, 1996; Cannon & Riordon, 1996). One implication of these models is that frequency of exposure eventually reaches a point where people experience tedium, and wear-out begins even though there is additional frequency. More importantly, these models assume that advertising effectiveness as a function of frequency increases until the tedium point is reached.
In the web advertising environment, the role of frequency is even more complicated due to the medium’s distinctive characteristics. For example, the web provides an environment where users engage in a much more active communication process than they do with traditional mass media. Due to this active engagement, web users tend to focus attention on objects of interest and pay less attention to or ignore objects outside of their sphere of interest. Moreover, existing research suggests that advertising wear-out occurs faster on the web than in traditional media. That is, even if web users are exposed to an ad, they pay significantly less attention to the same ad as exposure frequency increases. Past research suggests that this phenomenon, called “banner burnout”, explains why advertising effectiveness in terms of banner click-through rates reaches its maximum point at the first exposure and then declines rapidly with subsequent exposures until the click-through rate deteriorates to less than 1% at the fourth exposure (Pagendarm & Schaumburg, 2001).
Research on wear-out effects has focused on traditional media