Ad Characteristics
Many characteristics contribute to the ability of an advertisement to attract attention.
The size and intensity of an ad will often influence attention. Advertisement readership will increase with advertisement size, although not linearly. Research using Starch measures of advertising readership has found that readership scores of full-page ads using four colors are about 85 percent higher than are scores of half-page ads using four colors.
A "loud" ad stimulus will be more likely to be perceived than one of less intensity. Color presentations will usually attract more attention than will those in black and white: Starch concludes that the use of four colors generates about 50 percent more readership than black and white for one-page and two-page ads. Position can also influence attention. The left side of the page and the upper half get slightly more readership because of people's reading habits. Starch has concluded that ads on the back of a magazine will attract about 65 percent more readers than those toward the middle. Ads on the inside front and back covers will attract about 30 percent more readers.
Research has also highlighted the attention-getting properties of "vivid" information-information that is concrete rather than abstract, imagery provoking, emotionally interesting, containing a great deal of detail and specificity about objects, actions, outcomes, and situational context. It has been suggested that advertising phrased in concrete, detailed, and specific terms will attract more attention (and be more influential in shaping product quality judgments) than will copy phrased in abstract and general terms: It is important, however, for the message itself to be vivid, not simply the presentation of it, and for the consumer to process the information in terms of its imagery: vivid but irrelevant information may get initial attention but may not get processed and have no impact on subsequent attitudes.
Several studies have also investigated the impact of an ad's collative properties on the amount of attention given to them. Morris Holbrook and Donald Lehmann found that ads rated as surprising, incongruous, or funny were more likely to have been read, and Bruce Morrison and Marvin Dainoff found that the visual complexity of magazine ads was' positively related to the time that readers spent looking at these ads.
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