Lecture 2 – Breaking Through the Advertising
Clutter
Advertisers want to catch consumers’ attention and they want to break the clutter.
In general, there are four key characteristics of attention:
Attention is limited.
People only have just a limited pool of resources available and cannot consciously experience all
the events and information that is available at a certain point in time.
Attention is selective.
People selective attend to the most important and the most salient pieces of information in the
environment.
Attention is voluntary or involuntary.
People voluntary allocate attention to things that are important to them.
Salient or surprising things unintentionally draws attention.
Attention is a precondition for further processing.
Only after attention is allocated to a stimulus, sufficient resources are freed up to process
further information.
More attention means more cognitive capacity, which increases the likelihood that people will
comprehend and elaborate on the message.
Attention is the first and necessary step for any communication to take place or any effect in
communication to take place. Any communication message needs attention before consumers can
process it further and make decisions and judgments out of it.
There are four steps of processing in marketing communication:
Pre-attention Little or no capacity required (automatically processing).
Happens when something is salient.
Focal attention Little capacity required.
When a stimulus turns out more important.
Comprehension Modest levels of capacity required.
Elaboration Substantial levels of capacity required.
When people try to comprehend and elaborate on the message, they will
allocate more cognitive resources and more processing resources.
,In the pre-attention phase, when information from a message comes in, information processing is
automatic. Automatic visual and auditory information processing takes place.
Later when focal attention is allocated to the message, people zoom in on the information and try to
make sense of what they see and what they hear.
In the comprehension phase, we give meaning. For example, we relate the logo of an apple to our
syntactic knowledge and recognise that it is the logo of Apple.
In the elaboration phase, we come to a conceptual analysis and start to formulate propositions
based on what we know of Apple. For example, Apple computers are fast, or are expensive.
How Campaigns Can Stand Out – Involuntary Attention
Stimuli can attract consumers voluntary when they are personally relevant.
These personally relevant stimuli are called magnifiers because they increase/magnify the cognitive
resources that are allocated to the stimulus in question.
Involuntary attention is an unconscious process that causes an automatic orienting response.
There are four psychological mechanisms that can increase the involuntary attention to a stimulus:
Saliency Stimuli that stand out because
they are prominent, new or
related to life automatically
attracts our attention.
Perceptually prominent (size,
colour, contrast, etc.)
Novel, unexpected, and
original.
Stimuli related to life and death.
When being confronted with these salient stimuli, consumers receive mild
psychological arousal (and they are hard to ignore), that results in the
tendency to allocate more focal attention to the source of the information.
Novelty can prevent boredom and assures that people are more likely to
allocate more involuntary and subsequently voluntary attention.
Yerkes-Dodson Law: states that mild to moderate levels of arousal will
, result in the relative high level of cognitive capacity.
Mild levels of arousal will make sure that we allocate a sufficient level of
resources to try to understand the stimuli.
If arousal is too high or too low, very little cognitive capacity is available
and people will find it more difficult to process the communication. This
causes detrimental effects on elaboration.
Horizontal centrality Stimuli that are in the centre receive more attention and are more likely to
be chosen (e.g. in a shelf or on a screen).
Primacy Consumers are more attentive to items that are represented first in a list.
At the beginning, we have more cognitive resources left and, given that
attention is limited, more attention goes to the beginning.
Items that are listed first are also often the most important ones.
Implication: during commercial breaks, more attention goes to the
commercials that are presented first in the commercial break.
Picture superiority Pictorial information receives more attention than textual information.
Pictures attract attention, regardless of the size.
The bigger the text, the more attention it gets.
The bigger the brand, the more attention it gets.
These attractors are associated with bottom up processing, which refers to the way information
processing is built up from the smallest pieces of sensory information coming in our brain and
therefore driving information processing.
It comes from the outside world and goes through our senses to the top of our memory.
Top down processing is the opposite, which refers to perception that is driven down by cognition
and memory.
Voluntary Attention
Voluntary attention is often conscious and intended. We allocate attention to stimuli that are self-
relevant and that make us curious.
Because of the self-relevance, we deliberately allocate more resources to process the information.
Therefore, they are called magnetisers.
This form of processing is associated with top down processing, we relate the incoming
information to what we already know.
Self-referencing Attention increases when personalised information is used.
Personally addressing your consumers (e.g. in email marketing).
Use second person wording (you).
Proximity Consumers pay more attention to information that is ‘close’.
There are three types of proximity:
Sensory proximity = closeness in experience.
Spatial proximity = closeness in physical space.
Temporal proximity = closeness in time.
Implications:
EWOM comes from people close to us (spatial and sensory) and
information coming from people we know is seen as more important.
Viral marketing is emotionally vivid and is shared via friends (sensory).
Blogs are written by influencers that feel close (sensory).
Billboards and Abri’s are prominent and often close in space.
Curiosity Unfinished or mysterious ads.
, Consumers allocate more attention to information that is consistent with their goals. They will be
more attentive to advertisements that help them reach their goals.
Information that is not relevant, is often ignored, and will lead to inattentional blindness.
Banner blindness consumers ignore the first few sponsored search results (e.g. on Google)
because they do not find them relevant. People will also learn to avoid commercials and ads.
As marketeers it is important to be aware of this and not to spend too much advertising money on
advertising if we know that the information will be ignored when it is not relevant to our consumers.
The challenge for marketeers is to make ads that are relevant to the consumers.
Implications for SEA and SEO:
Organic results generate more attention and traffic because they are immediately relevant.
Sponsored results often suffer from inattentional blindness.
Involuntary processing is associated with bottom up processing as it is driven by what we see and
hear.
Voluntary processing is associated with top down processing, we start from what we know and use
that information to interpret what we see.
Increasing the Ease of Processing
The easier it is to process information; the less resources are needed for comprehension and
elaboration. So, the easier it is to process, the more likely it is that information is stored and
retrieved.
If we can stimulate people to link what they see in the message to things that they already know
from their memory it will make it easier for them to process and comprehend the message. This can
be done by using concrete information:
Visual information.
Concrete words.
Narrative information.
If we can link incoming information to existing knowledge, people will have more and stronger
memory traces. This leads to increased encoding, processing and
retrieval. Then, less attention is needed to thoroughly understand
the message.
Stronger memory can be traced through:
Visualisation & imagination dual coding theory
Processing fluency can be increased by using both verbal and
visual information in your campaign because visual and verbal
modalities lead to different encoding strategies.
Words are stored in verbal codes and images are stored in
visual codes. The net result is more and distinct memory traces because boards have separate
codes.
o Non-pictorial information (like imagination) is found to be stored in visual codes as well.
This means that if you use a narrative/story, this information is also considered to be visual
information.
Unnava & Burnkrant
Used a 2 by 2 design: level of imagery (high vs. low) and picture (present vs. absent).
