The Effects of Exposure Time on Memory of Display Advertisements

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The Effects of Exposure Time on Memory of Display Advertisements Daniel G. Goldstein dgg@yahoo-inc.com ABSTRACT Display advertising is a multi-billion dollar industry that has traditionally used a pricing scheme based on the number of impressions delivered. The number of impressions of an ad is simply the number of downloads of that ad. One impression, however, does not differentiate between an ad that is in view for five seconds or five minutes. Since advertisers seek brand recognition and recall, we ask whether a time-based accounting of advertising can better align with advertisers’ goals. This work aims to model the basic relationship between ad exposure time and the probability that a viewer will remember an advertisement. We investigate this question via two behavioral experiments, conducted using Amazon Mechanical Turk, in which people viewed Web pages accompanied by ads. The amount of time the ads were in view was either determined endogenously (as a function of reading speed) or exogenously (as a function of a timer and random assignment). Our results suggest that for exposure times of up to one minute, there is a strong, causal influence of exposure time on ad recognition and recall, with the marginal effects diminishing at durations beyond this level. Simple models describing memory response as a function of the logarithm of exposure time provide a good fit. In addition, we find that advertisements that are displayed when the Web page loads attain greater marginal increases in recognition per unit time than do ads that come into view second in a sequence. Nonetheless, for both types of ads, exposure time has a substantial effect. A psychologically-informed accounting system based on ad exposure duration, sequence and onset time may more closely align with advertiser goals than the industry standard of impression-based accounting. R. Preston McAfee

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