Banner Ad Mental Block

One of the many results of Jacob Nielsen's recent eyetracking research, emphasizes previous research showing banner blindness on websites. The concept of banner blindness summarizes that website users rarely look at anything that resemble ads. To perform the eyetracking research, Nielsen and his colleagues implemented cameras and infrared emitters hidden in the computer monitor. They then generated videos and heatmaps to study eye movements across webpages. Nielsen's banner ad research shows that both scanners and in-depth article readers rarely look at banner ads. Instead, they look for or read the content of interest, and move on. Nielsen gives three visual examples of this: Although the majority of ads do not receive a glance, Nielsen noted four elements in ads which are the most effective at getting attention.

1. Plain text
2. Faces
3. Cleavage and other sexual elements
4. Ads that look like website content

Along with relevancy, factor #1 and #4 above may contribute to why PPC and text ads often receive more clicks than banner ads. Although for banner ads, out of all the proved factors that gain attention, #2 seems to be the only one that could be best implemented. Plain text is boring, cleavage is tacky, and many websites have strict design guidelines in order to differentiate your banner ads from their site content. It seems the same thing is happening with traditional Internet advertising as has happened with traditional TV and radio advertising. Users are getting the content they came for and then skipping through the rest. As the traditional advertising world is seeing the greater effectiveness of PR and guerilla marketing, so is the interactive world seeing the importance of viral marketing and unique advertising methods in grabbing the web user's attention.