Preattentive Processing of Web Advertising By Chan Yun Yoo

Chapter 1

Introduction

Since advertising on the World Wide Web began in 1994 (Sterne, 1997), a host of advertisers have invested in Web advertising. Web advertising revenue totaled $12.5 billion in 2005 (Internet Advertising Bureau [IAB], 2006). The Web provides an alternative way for practitioners to deliver ad messages, but there has been an ongoing debate over the effectiveness of Web ads. Recently, Web advertising has endured much scrutiny due to its failure to engage consumers in interaction with advertising messages. The phenomenon called “banner blindness,” the tendency to ignore or avoid Web ads, especially among heavy Web users, is becoming an important issue in the industry (Norman, 1999).Similarly, click-through rates for banner ads started in 1996 at around 7%, but they dropped to 0.62% in 2003 (DoubleClick, 2004).