Advertisements and Ad Attentions

Researchers have attempted to measure the number of advertisements that each consumer is potentially exposed to every day, and these esti­mates range from at least several hundred to a couple of thousands.l Between 1967 and 1981, the average number of network TV commercials per day rose from 1,856 to 4,079, and by 1989 this number had risen further to 6,180. The rates of increase in non-network TV commercials was even greater. These in­creases occurred bo(h because more TV minutes per hour were devoted to commercials, and because more-and shorter-TV commercials ran in each commercial minute. While sixty-second TV commercials constituted 77 per­cent of all network commercials in 1965, they made up only 2 percent of the total in 1989, by which time thirty-second ads formed 57 percent of the total and fifteen-second spots formed 38 percent of the total.
With this increasing amount of clutter, and with more households zapping ads through their TV remote controls, it is becoming increasingly difficult for ads to gain the attention of consumers. And, because channel-switching and ad­avoidance means consumers are viewing fewer seconds of ever-smaller commer­cials with ever-reducing attention, even ads that do get watched communicate less of the intended information. Studies have found that ads are fully or partly mis­comprehended between 20 to 30 percent of the time.
Clearly, regardless of whether an ad is aiming at boosting recall, changing brand attitudes, or inducing purchase action, there are two important prerequi­sites for any effect t6 occur. First, an individual must be exposed to.it and pay some attention to it. As the hierarchies of effect pointed out, gaining a consumer's attention is usually the first step in creating effective ad­vertising. Getting such attention is rarely enough by itself, but an ad that fails to get attention is unlikely to achieve anything else. One might say that getting (and holding) a consumer's attention is a necessary but not sufficient condition in cre­ating effective advertising. In the second step, a consumer who does pay attention to an ad must interpret and comprehend it in the way the advertiser intended it to be interpreted. The communication must not be misinterpreted or miscompre­hended; if this does happen, the ad is unlikely to lead to the kind of attitude change that the advertiser seeks.
Each of these steps of attention and comprehension represents, in some sense, a perceptual barrier through which many advertisements fail to pass. Some advertisements are not successful at stimulating sense organs in the recipient to a minimal threshold level of interest or awareness. Other advertisements have their meaning distorted by the recipient in such a way that the effect of the advertise­ment is quite different from what the advertiser intended.
Perception has been defined as "the process by which an individual maintains contact with his environment,,4 and elsewhere as "the process whereby an individ­ual receives stimuli through the various senses and interprets them."SStimuli here can refer to sets of advertisements (such as a campaign), to a single advertise­ment, or to a portion of an advertisement. The process includes two stages-attention and interpretation (or comprehension). Both playa role in helping an individual cope with the infinite quantity of accessible stimuli, a quantity that would otherwise be impossible to process. The first stage is the attention filter. The second stage in perception is the interpretation process. An individual organizes the stimulus content into his or her own models of reality, models that may be very different from those of other individuals or of the sender. In doing so, the person often simplifies, distorts, organizes, and even "creates" stimuli.
Given this background on the perceptual process, it is clearly helpful to de­velop some understanding of these psychological processes, so that ads can be de­signed to maximize their attention-getting ability and their ability to correctly communicate the targeted copy-points. In the balance of the chapter we will con­sider, in turn, attention and comprehension.

Posted in: Advertising, Business, Marketing

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