Web Advertising And The Application Of The Feature Integration Theory

There has been a rise in the number of web advertisements with the increase of broadband users. Simultaneously web advertising as a novel form of media advertisements raises concern day to day increasingly among advertisers. Although the AIDA Formula (arousal of consumer attention, interest, desire and call for action) has always been widely applied to advertising design, and is regarded as the indispensable principle of a successful advertisement, "attention" as the initial psychological stage of the consumer receives little academic concern. DoubleClick, an Internet advertising corporation in US, has found through research that greater size of a web banner obtains more attention from web users, and Interactive Advertising Bureau echoes its discovery. Michelle Bayles from Wichita University proves through experiments that animation of banners enhances attention. However, there has been scarcity in the academic efforts that combine the above two types of research with a visual attentional processing theory. According to Anne Treisman, a professor from Princeton University, the two types of the above-mentioned research can be unified into the same preattentive stage of object perception in the Feature Integration Theory. Thus the author proposes in the dissertation that the FIT theory is applicable to explain web users' perception process of web advertising and thus the physical design of web advertising should employ the FIT theory to attract web user' attention. To test the hypothesis, the author of the dissertation collected necessary data and facts by observing in the 8 experiments the 30 subjects' online behavior, recording and calculating their response time and giving them relevant questions to see their advertisement recall. The results demonstrate that the FIT theory is applicable to explain web users' attention to web advertising and to direct the physical design of advertisements so as to attract visual attention of web users.