Attention grabbers: Exploring automatic attention responses to ad headlines

Advertisers are increasingly faced with problems of decreasing ad effectiveness as a result of ad clutter. In a series of seven experiments I explore how automatic attention responses may contribute to ad effectiveness in environments where we know ads receive little, if any, direct attention. Specifically, I test whether automatic attention responses to verbal stimuli can capture spatial attention and shift attention from an attended task to an advertising stimulus when these are separated spatially. I demonstrate that preattentive processing of verbal stimuli (ad headlines placed away from the area of focal attention) extracts sufficient semantic information to elicit automatic attention responses to, for example, threatening stimuli such as negative personality trait adjectives. Early experiments demonstrate differential recognition effects from non-focal positive versus negative headlines. Following experiments demonstrate that these effects can be replicated in environments featuring distracters in the secondary environment. Experiment 6 contrasts preattentive and attentive processing strategies to demonstrate that differential explicit memory effects result, at least in part, from preattentive processing and subsequent shifts in attention to headlines featuring negative words. Experiment 7 demonstrates that these automatic attention responses to ad headlines moderate preattentive mere exposure effects for associated ad stimuli such as brand names or logos.