The Effect of Webpage Complexity and Banner Animation on Banner Effectiveness in a Free Browsing Task

The effectiveness of banner advertisements has gained considerable attention among academics and practitioners. Despite the research progress in investigating the effect of banner properties (e.g., animation and location) on user perception and behavior, there is still a very limited understanding of how the properties of a banner and the surroundings of a website on which a banner is displayed can jointly influence its effectiveness. This study used eye-tracking technology to investigate the impact of banner animation and webpage complexity on users’ attention and memory performance. The results show that, during a free browsing task, an animated banner can attract earlier, greater, and more frequent attention from users and lead to better memory performance than a static one. Similarly, a banner on a low-complexity webpage also attracts earlier and more frequent attention among users and results in better memory performance than that on a high-complexity webpage. One implication is that an animated banner or a banner on a low-complexity webpage can provide a promising means of attracting users’ attention and enhancing their memory of the banners. Moreover, this study finds an interaction effect between banner animation and webpage complexity on the time to ?rst ?xation on a banner, but not on the total numbers or duration of fixations on a banner, or users’ memory performance. The finding highlights that an animated banner on a low-complexity website can be the most effective means to shorten the time to first fixation and quickly attract users’ attention. However, it cannot be deemed the most effective in generating greater and more frequent fixations on a banner, or leading to superior user memory performance.     

The effect of banner animation on fixation behavior and recall performance in search tasks

Previous findings suggested that banner ads have little or no impact on perceptual behavior and memory performance in search tasks, but only in browsing paradigms. This assumption is not supported by the present eye-tracking study. It investigates whether task-related selective attention is disrupted depending on the animation intensity of banner ads when users are in a search mode as well as the impact of banner animation on perceptual and memory performance.     

The impact of context on display ad effectiveness: Automatic attitude activation and applicability

Display and search ads are the most popular Internet ad formats. Instead of being placed on search engine result pages, display ads are placed on webpages that include more actual content. In order to improve online contextual advertising, the effects of webpage content on embedded display ads must be understood. This study investigates how viewers’ attitudes toward content and the applicability of that content to the adjacent display ads impact the effectiveness of those ads. The moderating effects of viewers’ attention and need for cognition are also examined. The experimental results show that webpage content automatically activates ad evaluations, and that this effect increases when viewers pay less attention to the ad or have a high need for cognition. If the webpage content is highly applicable to the ad, improvements are seen in the attitude toward the ad and the attitude toward the brand.     

Attention to eSports advertisement: effects of ad animation and in-game dynamics on viewers’ visual attention

ABSTRACT

ESports refers to professional video gaming that is typically broadcasted with a live commentary on TV or the Internet. Despite the rapid growth of eSports industry and its potential for a valuable advertising platform, there has not been much discussion about effective advertising strategies for the placement of virtual ads in eSports. Based on previous research, one advertisement factor (i.e. ad animation) and one in-game factor (i.e. in-game dynamics) are identified and tested in an experiment (N?=?116) with a 2 (ad animation: static vs. animated ads)?×?2 (in-game dynamics: battle vs. non-battle scenes) mixed design. The results show that both ad animation and in-game dynamics have a significant impact on viewers’ visual attention, in terms of fixation count and duration measured by an eye-tracking device. The results also show a significant interaction in which the impact of ad animation on fixation duration is more magnified when in-game play is less busy (i.e. non-battle scenes), compared to when it is busy (i.e. battle scenes). Theoretical implications based on the limited-capacity model, as well as practical implications for practitioners are discussed.     

Cultural differences on attention and perceived usability: Investigating color combinations of animated graphics

This experimental study investigates the effects of animated graphic colors on attention and perceived usability of users from two cultural groups, American and Thai. The experiment employs a three-way split-plot design with one between-subjects factor and two repeated-measures factors. The between-subjects factor contains two cultural groups, American and Thai. The two repeated-measures variables are a banner background color factor with six levels and a banner font color factor with two levels. Participants search for target words from text on Web pages that contain three animated banner graphics. The findings lead to the conclusion that users across cultures tend to ignore animated banner graphics when they look for specific information on highly informative Web pages. This study also suggests influences of culture on overall performance, overall retention, and overall self-reports on usability, regardless of differences in banner color combinations. Moreover, cultural differences on the self-report of attention drawing are also revealed in each banner color usage, except yellow banners with white text. This study does not aim at exploring superiority of participants between cultures. Rather, it attempts to explore some possible cultural differences in interacting with a computer interface that could facilitate cognition and perception of users from different cultural groups.     

Retain viewer’s attention on banner ad by manipulating information type of the content

The influence of phenomenon like Banner blindness and Habituation has weakened researchers’ efforts to highlight the effect of adding salient visual features to ads. On the other hand, many studies discussed advertising attention on the basis of individual pages, neglecting the fact that most ads reside on one of a sequence of webpages that a viewer continuously reads. Therefore, our study discussed advertising attention from a different perspective, switching focus to the information type and their influence on attention in a sequence of webpages. This study, extended from our previous study, in which we found user attention to advertisement to drop sharply beyond the initial page, planned to investigate if it is possible to dishabituate users and enhance viewer‘s attention on banner ads by manipulating the information type of a sequence of content. We found that viewer’s attention on ads can be prolonged on subsequent pages with a rudimentary stimulus variation to content order and without changing any visual design feature of the ad itself, which is prone to the crippling effects of banner blindness and habituation, and that the image-based content inserted between pages of text-based content plays an important role in raising overall attention to advertisement.     

The impacts of banner format and animation speed on banner effectiveness: Evidence from eye movements

Given that banner ad investment is huge and keeps increasing, the effectiveness of banners is important for advertising practitioners and is worth attention from academics. Banner properties (e.g. format and animation) may influence the overall effectiveness of banners. However, research on how banner formats (e.g. location and orientation) affect banner effectiveness is still in its early stage and studies on how animation influences banner effectiveness have also found controversial results. By conducting an experiment using eye-tracking technology, this study investigated the impacts of banner properties, especially animation speed and format, on users' attention, recall, and attitudes towards banners. In terms of attention, both the main effects and the interaction effect were significant and the patterns varied across time. However, no significant effects were found on recall and attitudes.     

Quantifying the indirect effects of a marketing contact

The Internet banner advertising has become an important marketing channel in recent years. There is a strong demand in the industry to quantify the expected return from a marketing contact. Contacts have both direct effects, such as a banner ad prompting the viewer to click and buy, and indirect effects, such as building awareness so that future exposures are more likely to result in a sale. While it is usually straightforward to track and model direct effects, models that fail to account for indirect effects produce inaccurate estimates of the contact value and allocate marketing resources inefficiently. Our research is based on a relational database for banner ads from a major American internet service provider, which records the complete information about the exposures, the clicks and the transactions. The indirect effect of marketing contacts is modeled with a decaying function of the time since the prospect gets into the system. Discrete survival analysis is used to estimate the marginal effects of each additional exposure. The approach is illustrated with a pedagogical example based on the estimates from the internet banner ad model.     

Preattentive processing of banner advertisements: The role of modality,location, and interference

This paper deals with the preattentive processing of banner advertisements under competitive interference conditions. In the absence of competitive interference, our experimental results were consistent with hemispheric lateralization: pictorial banner ads were evaluated more positively when positioned on the left (vs. right) side of a webpage, whereas the opposite pattern was observed for verbal banner ads. In contrast, this interaction disappeared in the presence of competitive interference. Specifically, verbal banner ads received more positive evaluations than pictorial ads when they featured products from the same category. In addition, banner ads were more liked when positioned on the left (vs. right) side when they were of the same ad modality.     

浅析动漫卡通形象设计

动漫卡通角色是动漫的灵魂,一个好的动画角色,预示着无穷的文化价值和商业价值。卡通化的造型以其凸现感官强烈的视觉快感,幽默虚拟的形象,满足了人们欢愉和体验的激情。今天动画产业已作为文化创意产业的一部分,给娱乐经济带来飞速的发展,动画角色的商业价值也成了关注的焦点。动画角色不仅仅是个二维的形象,通过对动画角色形象的外延产业开发,使其具有巨大的文化效益和经济效益。     

The Long‐Term Effects of E‐Advertising: The Influence of Internet Pop‐ups Viewed at a Low Level of Attention in Implicit Memory

Faced with an abundance of advertising messages, Internet users allocate only minimal cognitive resources to advertising. What are the effects of pop‐up ads for a new brand viewed at low‐level attention, and then measured when the Internet users have forgotten having seen them? In the theoretical context of processing fluency and implicit memory, the experiment (n = 398) studied the effects of repeated brief exposure to different types of content (words/image) in pop‐up ads 7 days and 3 months after exposure. The results show the overall positive effects of the pop‐ups, the superiority of the image over words for effects on attitude toward the brand and the purchase intentions; but the words produce more semantic effects than the image.     

Instructional animations can be superior to statics when learning human motor skills

Based on the assumption of a working memory processor devoted to human movement, cognitive load theory is used to explore some conditions under which animated instructions are hypothesised to be more effective for learning than equivalent static graphics. Using paper-folding tasks dealing with human movement, results from three experiments confirmed our hypothesis, indicating a superiority of animation over static graphics. These results are discussed in terms of a working memory processor that may be facilitated by our mirror-neuron system and may explain why animated instructional animations are superior to static graphics for cognitively based tasks that involve human movement.     

Sketching human character animations by composing sequences from large motion database

Quick creation of 3D character animations is an important task in game design, simulations, forensic animation, education, training, and more. We present a framework for creating 3D animated characters using a simple sketching interface coupled with a large, unannotated motion database that is used to find the appropriate motion sequences corresponding to the input sketches. Contrary to the previous work that deals with static sketches, our input sketches can be enhanced by motion and rotation curves that improve matching in the context of the existing animation sequences. Our framework uses animated sequences as the basic building blocks of the final animated scenes, and allows for various operations with them such as trimming, resampling, or connecting by use of blending and interpolation. A database of significant and unique poses, together with a two-pass search running on the GPU, allows for interactive matching even for large amounts of poses in a template database. The system provides intuitive interfaces, an immediate feedback, and poses very small requirements on the user. A user study showed that the system can be used by novice users with no animation experience or artistic talent, as well as by users with an animation background. Both groups were able to create animated scenes consisting of complex and varied actions in less than 20 minutes.     

The Impact of Advertising Location and User Task on the Emergence of Banner Ad Blindness: An Eye-Tracking Study

The purpose of this study is to explore the emergence of ad banner blindness in the viewing of e-commerce home pages. Building on the literature on inattention blindness and banner blindness, this article assessed the gaze path of users in goal-directed and free-viewing tasks when viewing pages with advertising banners on the right side of the page and on the top of the page above the main navigation menu. The hypotheses are tested using an analysis of variance. Using an eye-tracking methodology, the results identify significant differences in visual attention for banner ad location and for task type. Banner blindness is strongest for advertising banners on the right side of the page and for goal-directed tasks. Neither participants’ ratings of page visual appeal or of page familiarity could explain the findings. The study contributes to the existing literature by resolving some of the cognitive factors that lead to banner blindness and supplementing previous research that focused on relevant perceptual factors.     

Distraction effects of contextual advertising on online news processing: an eye-tracking study

Although recent scholarship has shown that congruency between editorial content and display advertising on web pages can lead to favourable outcomes for the advertiser, it is unclear whether these gains for advertisers come at the expense of users’ ability to process the content. To examine whether contextual in-page advertising distracts users during information processing, a 2 (target message argument type: weak/strong)?×?2 (ad relevance: high/low) between-subjects factorial experiment (N?=?99) examined how readers of a news article about risks associated with texting while driving (a) paid attention to the article, (b) paid attention to the advertisements, and (c) were persuaded by the article contents. Participants’ visual attention was captured unobtrusively using a device-mounted eye-tracking device. The findings show that readers were more likely to be persuaded by weaker arguments when the article was presented alongside highly relevant display ads than when the article was presented alongside less relevant ads. Readers also paid greater attention to relevant ads than irrelevant ads, and, surprisingly, readers in the strong argument condition paid more attention to the story content when it was presented alongside relevant ads. The implications for theories of visual attention and for online content publishers are discussed.     

Parallel line integral convolution

Line integral convolution (LIC) is a powerful method for computing directional textures from vector data. LIC textures can be animated, yielding the effect of flowing motion. Both, static images and animation sequences are of great significance in scientific visualization. Although an efficient algorithm for computing static LIC textures is known, the generation of animation sequences still requires a considerable amount of computing time. In this paper we propose an algorithm for computing animation sequences on a massively parallel distributed memory computer. With this technique it becomes possible to utilise animated LIC for interactive vector field visualization. To take advantage of the strong temporal coherence between different frames, parallelization is performed in image space rather than in time. Image space coherence is exploited using a flexible update and communication scheme. In addition algorithmic improvements on LIC are proposed that can be applied to parallel and sequential algorithms as well.     

Improving learning from animated soccer scenes: Evidence for the expertise reversal effect

In two experiments, we investigated how animation of play (soccer) should be designed in order to avoid the high cognitive load due to the fleeting nature of information. Using static pictures and altering the animation’s presentation speed have been proposed as instructional strategies to reduce learners’ cognitive load. In the first experiment, we tested the effect of static vs. animated presentations on learning. The results indicated that novices benefited more from the static presentation whereas experts benefited more from the animated presentation. The second experiment investigated the effect of low vs. normal vs. high levels of presentation speed on learning. The results showed that novices profited more from the low presentation speed while experts profited more from the normal and high presentation speeds. Thus both experiments demonstrated the occurrences of the expertise reversal effect. Findings suggest that the effectiveness of instructional strategies depends on levels of soccer players’ expertise.     

对动画片的剧本主题研究

本文就动画片剧本主题的发展历史和现状,结合国内外相关领域的成功案例,分析我国动漫产业如何发掘出更多的动画故事,使得我国动画剧本的取材更加多样化,制作出更多的优秀动画作品,从取材致胜,加快我国动画产业的进一步发展。     

论色彩在动画场景中的功能

动画创作中,我们不能混淆"场景"和"背景"的概念。色彩是塑造场景最重要的视觉造型语言,我们需要了解色彩在动画场景中的重要功能。弄清场景创作过程中容易忽略的色彩在时间上的节奏对比问题,注重色彩的心理象征隐喻的应用,有助于我们提升动画影片的品质和文化内涵。     

The impact of animated interface agents: a review of empirical research

Over the last years, the animation of interface agents has been the target of increasing interest. Largely, this increase in attention is fuelled by speculated effects on human motivation and cognition. However, empirical investigations on the effect of animated agents are still small in number and differ with regard to the measured effects. Our aim is two-fold. First, we provide a comprehensive and systematic overview of the empirical studies conducted so far in order to investigate effects of animated agents on the user's experience, behaviour and performance. Second, by discussing both implications and limitations of the existing studies, we identify some general requirements and suggestions for future studies.