Research on familiarity and visual attention in advertising began in the early 1990s, with research questions relating to health and public policy. Krugman et al. (1994) set
out to assess whether health warnings in cigarette advertising influenced the visual attention of adolescents. The team compared an established health warning used at the time on print advertisements with a newly redesigned warning. As the old design version was featured on the advertising at that time, the respondents were likely to be familiar with it. The researchers recruited a large sample of respondents for the time – 326 teenage participants – and showed them different types of advertisements on a projector screen while measuring their eye movements. The findings indicated that significantly fewer participants focused on ad elements containing the old – hence more familiar – warning design. They also reported that the old warning was noted significantly later than the new one. This suggested that a certain element of an advertisement – a health warning – received less visual attention, as consumers become more familiar with it by seeing it on multiple advertisements. In contrast, when they were faced with a new – thus unfamiliar – health warning, they tended to notice it more.
Although the study provided some basic insights into the influence of familiarity on visual attention, it is hard to generalise the findings beyond the context due to the chosen stimulus. The study focused on a single ad element, a health warning, and it was assumed that consumers were familiar with it, as it was an element that had to be present in ads at the time. Perhaps because the same creative execution of a warning was present in all advertisements, consumers came to expect it. Hence, just the fact that there was something new in a place where they expected to see the standard warning could have drawn their attention, rather than their familiarity with it. The study was also based on a sample of adolescents which is a younger sample than recruited by subsequent researchers.
Pieters, Rosbergen and Hartog (1995) addressed some of the limitations of the study carried out by Krugman et al. (1994) and demonstrated that consumers familiar with an ad pay less attention to it. The researchers investigated the effects of multiple
advertisement exposures and motivation on visual attention to print ads, as well as to their elements – headline, pictorial, text and packshot. Multiple exposure was used as a measure of familiarity, because with increased exposures consumers are more likely to learn and memorise the ad, thus becoming more familiar with it. Although the study focused on a smaller sample of individuals (68 respondents) than Krugman et al.
(1994), it utilised a similar methodology and showed the advertisements on a projector screen, measuring the eye movements of participants. The results expanded the findings of Krugman et al. (1994) and demonstrated that consumers more familiar with an ad – those who saw it multiple times – looked less not just at certain elements, but
at the overall ad. Furthermore, familiarity influenced the participants’ visual search – participants with higher ad familiarity skipped significantly more ad elements. However, it did not influence the order in which elements were looked at. The findings suggest that as consumers become more familiar with advertising they still view the ad in a similar manner, yet they tend to skip the ad elements they see as perhaps not relevant or the ones they have already learned through multiple exposures.
This inverse relationship between visual attention and familiarity was further supported by Pieters, Rosbergen and Wedel (1999). The researchers looked at how the amount and distribution (referred to as scanpaths) of visual attention to print advertising was affected by multiple exposures. The respondents were asked to view a digital magazine on a computer screen while their eye movements were recorded. It was concluded that multiple exposures to an ad – hence, increased familiarity with it – led to significantly less visual attention to it. Specifically, on average, by third exposure a print ad received just over a half of the attention it received during the first exposure. This finding directly supports the conclusions reached by Pieters, Rosbergen and Hartog (1995).
Furthermore, Pieters, Rosbergen and Wedel (1999) confirmed the findings of Pieters, Rosbergen and Hartog (1995) and showed that although the overall visual attention to an ad decreased with familiarity, it did not alter the order in which the ad elements (such as brand name, product, headline and pictorial) were viewed and the direction of eye movements as measured by scanpath. This demonstrated that the measurement of visual attention can influence the outcome. Although consumers scanned familiar ad elements in a similar order and with a similar scanpath than unfamiliar ads, overall they paid less attention to familiar ads. Pieters, Rosbergen and Wedel (1999) employed a more robust methodology than the previous research outlined in this section and recruited a random sample of 118 participants, whereas the previous researchers based their findings on non-probability samples of students or consumers recruited via a market research company. Therefore, by confirming previous results in a study with a robust methodology, Pieters, Rosbergen and Wedel (1999) provided further support that more familiar advertisements attract less attention, but also showed that familiarity does not influence the direction of visual attention.
Until that point, researchers had focused on examining visual attention to the whole ad or to the order in which its elements are viewed, rather than looking at visual attention to specific ad elements. The latter topic was studied by Pieters, Warlop and Wedel (2002) a few years later. The authors examined the effect of print advertisement
originality and familiarity on visual attention to the key ad elements – brand, text and imagery. The researchers used eye-tracking data from a previous study, which
included eye gaze data from 119 participants browsing through two magazines with 58 full-page ad inserts. Higher ad familiarity was shown to reduce visual attention to the text element of the ad. However, higher familiarity did not have an effect on visual attention to brand or pictorial elements. This finding provides further insight into the way familiarity influences visual attention.
Both Pieters, Rosbergen and Hartog (1995) and Pieters, Rosbergen and Wedel (1999) showed that familiar consumers tended to scan ad elements in a similar order, thus they still saw the main elements, but they looked less at the overall ad. Pieters, Warlop and Wedel (2002) expanded on these findings and showed that the reduction in overall attention to the ad is likely to come from familiar consumers looking less at the text elements of the advertisement. This demonstrated that the content of an ad has the potential to influence consumers’ visual attention. Nonetheless, it should be noted that Pieters, Warlop and Wedel (2002) used a different measure of familiarity than the previous studies outlined in this section. The prior research measured familiarity as the number of repeated exposures during the study (Pieters, Rosbergen and Hartog, 1995;
Pieters, Rosbergen and Wedel, 1999) or chose a widely used health warning design that the participants were likely to have seen before in real advertising (Krugman et al., 1994). In these instances, the researchers were confident that they had a valid
measure of familiarity for an individual participant. Pieters, Warlop and Wedel (2002) took a different approach, using two independent sets of four trained judges to
measure each advertisement familiarity on a 7-point scale. The need for independent judging was likely caused by the authors reusing the data collected for a different project without assessing the familiarity of respondents in that study. As familiarity is a subjective concept (an ad judged familiar by a judge might not necessarily be familiar to an individual respondent), this approach reduces the validity of the measurements.
As a result, the research findings of Pieters, Warlop and Wedel (2002) may not be directly comparable to those of other studies.
The topic of implicitly familiar advertisement elements and visual attention was further examined by Peterson et al. (2010). The team aimed to examine teenagers’ visual attention to print advertisements and subsequent memory of the ads. The researchers examined the differences between visual attention to ads featuring the approved textual health warnings and ads featuring a novel health warning with an image. As the approved warnings were used on all advertisements in real life, the participants had probably encountered them before and were thus more familiar with them. The results
were consistent with the earlier findings of Krugman et al. (1994) and showed that a familiar, widely used design received significantly less visual attention than the new unfamiliar design. However, it should be noted that the novel design used by Peterson et al. (2010) featured a graphic image together with a textual message. The presence of an image that was out of place relative to the overall design might have influenced visual attention regardless of the message, especially given the small sample of 32 respondents.