Some of you might think that exposing people to ads and repeating the same ad over and over is just how advertising works. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. How many of you have clicked on a banner ad either brand new or familiar in the past week or month? Don’t know, well, let’s ask the psychologists, in this day and age, psychologists are brought in to everything.

We’re talking specifically about website banner ads, click-through and revenue generated by it. I suppose the same could apply to a magazine ad or sign along the highway but the click-through and revenue generated by said ads cannot be directly measured, it can be with a banner ad.

An article written up at Ars Technica says the Journal of Consumer Research asked a sampling of students to read an essay that was populated with banner ads about a fictitious camera brand called Pretec. The students were led to believe they would be quizzed on the essay but instead were asked how they “felt” about the Pretec brand.

With more exposure to the ads, feelings didn’t really change, and even after 20 exposures feelings were still positive. Of course other research has shown people will click on just about anything. Really, WHERE are these people coming from?

I can’t speak for the students or the study but here is how I might have reacted. First, I would have told them how boring the essay was (I’ve never read an INTERESTING one), second, I would have told them it might have been better to test against real brands because I know just about every camera brand sold in the US, third, I’d tell them if I know a product is bad then exposing me to it isn’t going to make me want to click on the ad or buy it. Exposing me to a bag of manure over and over again is not going to entice me to buy the bag of manure.

Let’s take Polaroid… I don’t know how many Polaroid ads I’ve seen over the years online or off but I can say I would never buy a Polaroid camera, why, because all the reviews range from terrible to mediocre across all Polaroid models.

I don’t make a decision about a product based on an ad and if asked that, that’s what I would say and if asked to make a determination based on the ad then I’d say I wouldn’t buy it, I don’t buy things I can’t research, it *IS* that simple.

If I went from there this would turn into a post about which cameras you SHOULD buy and I don’t want that to happen so I will just leave you that to think on.

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Entry was posted on Sunday, May 20th, 2007 at 6:35 am under Internet, Uncategorized.

Read more entries by Jonathan Schlaffer.
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