Internet Advertising and Your Brain (A)

Imagine that your first job after business school is asthe main marketing person for a fairly young company(started by the usual, a friend of a friend...). Thiscompany supports a travel Web site that specializes in\extreme sports" (e.g., skiing off cliffs, riding mountainbikes from great heights into large air bags, as well asthe more \traditional" bungee jumping and skydiving).The target audience is the current profile of users, thatis, men in their 20s (though the percentages of womenand older thrill-seekers are growing). This group ofcustomers is coincidentally also highly likely to be\wired"; thus, advertising online is expected to beeffective at reaching this audience.It is your responsibility as the Extreme Marketer toconduct tests to assess the ROI effectiveness of yourcompany's online advertisements. At the moment,you've created two variations of a banner ad invitingbrowsers to your Web site and you're trying to choosebetween the two?which is most likely to attract theseguys to click onto your site to learn more about yourvacation packages and then possibly purchase one?One of the ad banners your creative staff has developed is depicted in vivid colors, with captivating graphics that attempt to illustrate the possible thrills, suchas a photo with a view of skiers at the top of a mountainshot from their delivery helicopter, or a photo of a skydiver in midair taken by a skydiving photographer. Thisad format offers very little by way of informative content,such as details about the logistics of the trips, locations,lengths of stay, price, and so on. This ad is analogous towhat is traditionally called the \beauty" shot in advertising production (a televised or still photo shot thatshows the car or the jar of peanut butter without mentioning miles per gallon or caloric content). Thus, let'scall this version of the possible banner ad \beauty."Another banner ad has been prepared that appearssomewhat less colorful and less pictorial in style, butwhich contains more detailed information about theextreme sports outings you are hoping to encouragethe viewers to purchase. Given its greater informationcontent, let's call this version of the banner ad \info."You could just run a little study at this point. Youcould purchase banner ad space on your usual business relationship Web sites, randomly assigning half ofthose sites your beauty ad, and half your info ad. Thenyou would sit back and count over some duration (suchas the next two weeks) the number of click-throughsyou achieved with the one ad format versus the other,and conclude that the banner ad with the greater drawshould be the one with which your firm proceeds.However, you have done your homework and areaware of some secondary data from eye-tracking studies. These studies insert small cameras into PC screensthat monitor where the PC user is looking. The resultssuggest that placing the banner ad on some locations onthe screen may be more effective than others. For example, one theory is that the brain processes whatever isin the right of a person's visual field in the left half of the

brain, and stimuli in the left part of a person's visual fieldis processed in the right-brain hemisphere. Researchconducted by physiological psychologists suggests thatthe left brain processes analytical features and verbaldescriptions most effectively, whereas the right brainprocesses pictures and holistic impressions better.The info ad is verbal and offers many facts thatreaders could use to analyze and assess their interest,and the beauty ad is mostly graphics and leaves aholistic impression of the thrill-seeking vacation. Thus,you're beginning to think that perhaps the info ad wouldbe best understood and most persuasive if it wereprocessed by a viewer's left brain, which would dictateplacing it on the right side of a Web page. In contrast,the beauty ad might be better understood and morepersuasive if it were processed by a viewer's right brain,which means placing the banner ad on the left side ofthe viewer's screen. See Figure below.So now the Internet advertising study you've createdis somewhat more complicated. There are two factors,rather than just one: the advertising type (beauty orinfo) and the banner placement (left or right). Yourexpectations are that the ad is most likely to be effective (measured for the moment by the number of clickthroughs it achieves) if the beauty ad is placed to theleft or the info ad is placed to the right. However, youcreate all possible combinations because, after all, yourhypothesis about \which ad should do better where" isin fact just a hypothesis. Thus, although each Webtraveler sees only one ad, there are four ad variations:beauty on the left, beauty on the right, info on the left,and info on the right. You buy your ad space at yourusual supplier Web sites, and you randomly assign oneof the four ads to each of those locations. Youdetermine how long you will wait (for example, twoweeks) before counting the results.

"Beauty" Shot "Info" Ad . Vivid colors . Less colorful . Captivating graphics . Less pictorial . Photo extreme sports . More info/descriptions Little info/details Left PICS/HOLISTIC Right VERBAL Beauty Banner ad type (beauty/info) x banner placement (left/right) Info Dependent variable = click-throughs