As we reported in MediaDailyNews yesterday, a New York-based media research firm has released a study showing that as frequency of exposure to banners increases, click-through rates decrease.
Time to dust off those old advertising textbooks and turn back to basics. The concept of ad "wear-out" has been around as long as advertising itself. Decades of studying TV advertising, for
example, have shown that viewers learn to skip over or ignore TV commercials with excessive exposure. Same goes for banners.
It should be noted that if and when the web is proven as a
valuable branding medium, frequency of banner exposure should be revisited. But for now, I don't think understanding the inverse relationship between frequency and click-throughs requires a study.
It requires just a little common sense.
To paraphrase a panelist from the recent Jupiter Forum, if a web user sees the same shampoomypet.com banner 30 times, there's no way he or she will click
on it 30 times. Why does it seem that online advertisers are continuously trying to reinvent the wheel?
And it's not just about media. It's about creative, too. Take last week, for example.
New-York based research firm Dynamic Logic released a study that found a direct relationship between how "cluttered" a banner is and its success in lifting brand awareness. DL's research showed
that when too many elements are included, consumers tune out the creative, thereby limiting its ability to have an impact.
What a concept! As one of our readers said, "Isn't it a rule of
graphic presentation to "use white"?? Do we change completely when we sit in front of computer screens?"