“HALF the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don’t know which half,” said John Wanamaker, the 19th-century US chain-store magnate. Had he lived today, Wanamaker might have found it even trickier to plan a marketing campaign. Online advertising is growing rapidly in importance, yet the vast majority of internet adverts fail to engage web surfers – 1000 web-advert exposures usually result in about three “click-throughs”.
Internet users tend to avoid fixing their eyes on anything that looks like advertising – a phenomenon dubbed “banner blindness” says Nidhi Mathur of Hewlett-Packard’s research lab in Bangalore, India. That makes it hard to get their attention online. One solution is to go back to print.
“Internet users avoid fixing their eyes on anything that looks like advertising”
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That’s the new strategy being used by site owners and advertisers: ensuring that when a user clicks on a web page’s “print this page” button – which traditionally leads to a pared-down page containing only the users desired content, such as the text of a news article or a map – the ads also appear on the printout. But does this work?
To find out, Mathur and her colleagues gave 450 internet users access to a 21-page travel website and asked them to plan a travel itinerary. The volunteers had to print out the web page containing details of their final destination. Some of the printouts contained adverts.
About a week later, the participants – who had no idea what the researchers were investigating – were asked what they recalled from the exercise. hold a stark message for e-advertisers: none recalled the web page ads at all.
When the ads were present on printouts, however, 33 per cent of users recalled the advertised brand and 22 per cent remembered what the advert was saying. Recall of printed web ads is certainly statistically significant,” says Mathur.
This may not last, says Joanna Bawa, a UK-based psychologist specialising in user interfaces. “People are increasingly resistant to ads generally, and will soon figure out what’s going on,” she told New Scientist. “There’s the possibility of increased resentment towards ads which ‘steal’ valuable printing time, paper and cartridge ink, especially for domestic users or those with slower printers. It may lead to a greater aversion to printing.”
That would be bad news for HP, which makes printers, among other things. Mathur says advertisers should place well-designed ads that people don’t mind seeing on “print this” pages.
