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Given that more than 50% of the banner ad exposures are not attended to (Drèze & Hussherr, 2003) and consumers purposefully avoid Web ads during their online activities, greater research effort is necessary to understand whether preattentive (vs. conscious) processing has taken place and how it affects consumers’ responses to Web ads.
Two underlying mechanisms to explain how preattentive processing may facilitate consumers’ responses to Web ads have been suggested: feature and semantic analysis. Studies in cognitive psychology and advertising have credited preattentive processing of the stimuli to perceptual fluency arising from a feature analysis during the exposure (e.g., Janiszewski, 1993; Shapiro et al., 1997b). Perceptual fluency explains that when exposure leaves a memory trace of the perceptual features (e.g., color, size, brightness, motion), the features of the stimulus are more easily accessed and more positively evaluated on a subsequent occasion even in the case of explicit memory (e.g., recall, recognition) failure. Furthermore, as demonstrated in Shapiro’s (1999) experiment, conceptual fluency led by semantic analysis during the preattentive processing explains why the semantically related product and ad information can be more facilitated (i.e., the context facilitation effect) in a later judgment.
Two potential factors affecting the extent of preattentive processing were examined in this study. Both factors are advertiser-controlled ones.