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Journal ofMedia Psychology

Theories, Methods, and Applications

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Journal ofMedia Psychology

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Original Article

Reintegrating the AdEffects of Context Congruency Banner Advertising

in Hybrid Media

Diana Rieger, Franzisca Bartz, and Gary Bente

Department of Psychology, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany

Abstract. Banner ads – often placed on the right-hand side of a website – are prone to lose their effectiveness due to banner blindness. The currentstudy investigated whether context congruency was able to increase the banner’s impact. Our study tested context congruencies (pictures or textelements or both) and their impact on awareness, retention, and attitude toward an advertisement. We used eye tracking to account for effects onvisual attention relative to contact time and further information processing. Results indicated that complete context congruency including both visualand textual elements leads to higher visual awareness, better retention, and better attitudes toward the advertisement.

Keywords: online advertising, context congruency, eye tracking

According to a global survey, 79% of online consumersplanned to purchase products or services online (Nielsen,2010). It is thus not surprising that the Internet advertisingindustry had the biggest increase in market share, 7.2% amongall media formats (Nielsen, 2012). Selling a product onlineneeds the attention of the possible buyer. A very promisingway to arouse this attention is to position the product in afitting context. Google AdSense and other marketing strate-gists use content matching to enhance awareness of theproduct. The media context can activate the needs of possiblecustomers, thereby motivating them to concentrate on ads thatare congruent with the editorial content (Macinnis &Jaworski, 1989; Petty, Barden, & Wheeler, 2002).

For instance, when search results from search engines(e.g., a search for ‘‘travel insurance’’) come with advertise-ments for cheap flights or hotel offerings to match yoursearch, apparently you are planning a trip, with advertisingthat you might in consequence find relevant (Kim &Sundar, 2012). Context congruency can thereby beachieved through matched topics – be it through matchingtext information and/or corresponding pictures. However,although users’ impressions and attitudes toward advertise-ments depend on contextual factors, people can also be una-ware of these congruency effects (Dahlen, 2005; Moorman,Neijens, & Smit, 2005).

Most research on these effects of Web page–bannercongruency is based on the mechanisms of priming: ‘‘Acongruent medium context makes consumers more suscep-tible to the information in the ad, encourages them to pro-cess this information more intensively, and prompts them toevaluate the information and the ad more positively’’(Janssens, De Pelsmacker, & Geuens, 2012, p. 581). Thesepriming effects can explain why contextual or personalized

advertising, placed on special-interest Web pages can bevery effective (Kalyanaraman & Sundar, 2006, 2008).

A recent study by Kim and Sundar (2012) demonstratedthat contextual relevance and personal relevance can beregarded to have similar effects with regard to their contri-bution to users’ attitudes toward a website. That is, bothpersonal relevance (e.g., issue involvement or interest inthe advertised topic before exposure to the Web page) aswell as contextual relevance (e.g., congruence of contentand advertisement on the actual Web page) can serve theadvertiser’s intention to increase the attitude toward theproduct. This research, however, focused on attitudestoward the product after seeing the Web page. It is stillan open question whether ads also receive the same amountof visual attention when the context is matched to advertise-ment during website exposure. This is, for instance, impor-tant for more general websites on which personalization ishard to realize, such as news portals that cannot rely on aspecial interest of the page’s visitor.

Concerning visual attention, Dr�ze and Hussherr(2003), as well as Stenfors, Mor�n, and Balkenius (2003),report that users form habituated scan-paths on websiteswhich tend not to include advertising elements. By now,typical banner positions are learned, and this knowledgeis used to avoid them. This effect is called banner blindness(Benway, 1998). In contrast to more traditional media, theInternet is used in a goal-directed manner (Chen & Wells,1999; Cho & Cheon, 2004; Eighmey, 1997; Korgaonkar &Wolin, 1999; Li, Edwards, & Lee, 2002). Banner positions(which are integrated in the content of the website) areignored when they do not correspond to the intentional taskof the customer. Additionally, users adopt more negativebehaviors when a site displays ads than when the site does

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not (McCoy, Everard, Galletta, & Polak, 2004). This couldresult in the idea that Internet advertising is nonsensical,uninformative, forgettable, and ineffective (McCoy et al.,2004) which, however, is not the case according to statisticson online advertisements.

Nevertheless, to be perceived, ads have to gain rele-vance for the customer, for example through fittingness(Kanungo & Pang, 1973) or congruence (Kamins, 1990;Lynch & Schuler, 1994) with the editorial content of thewebsite. Ads that appear relevant to the website contentcan be perceived as related to the users’ own goals andinterests. Because the reason for visiting the page wasfound to influence which parts of an advertisement arefocused on (Hooge & Erkelens, 1998; Rayner, Miller, &Rotello 2008; Rayner, Rotello, Stewart, Keir, & Duffy,2001), context congruency may help position the advertise-ment as informational and important.

There is so far only scarce evidence on how contextualadvertising works in multicontent environments in terms ofvisual awareness. Janssens et al. (2012) investigated pat-terns of divided attention to ads based on (in)congruencywith the Web page and could demonstrate that when atten-tion is undivided (fewer gaze jumps), a congruent banneradvertisement gets more positive responses. However, fromthis research, the pattern of visual attention was not appar-ent, because dwell times on the ad were not analyzed. It isstill an open question which aspects of congruency are ben-eficial for visual awareness of the banner advertisement andalso regarding other factors relevant for advertising, such asretention and attitudinal effects. To address these questions,we investigated (1) whether banners gained more attentionwhen they appeared congruent to the editorial content ofthe website, (2) whether different patterns of visual aware-ness on the banner were apparent relative to the exposuretime, (3) whether congruent banners led to better retentionof the ad, and (4) whether differences in attitude toward thead or the product were to be observed. To account for dif-ferent effects of visual and textual elements, we varied thekind of information in which the context congruencyappeared. To test this approach, we used online (eye track-ing) as well as post hoc measures (questionnaires).We focused on a starting page of a famous news portalin order to investigate context congruency in an environ-ment that is built for the broad public and not for specialinterests. Further, as is common on news portals, we dis-played real websites on which only the main article onthe page was manipulated in terms of context congruency.We thereby extended previous research that has focused onspecial interest sites on which the whole content and theadvertisement appeared congruently.

In the following sections, we will first elaborate thedifferent methodologies used to track advertising effects– that is, online measures (such as eye tracking) as wellas post hoc measures (such as memory effects and atti-tudes). We will further emphasize the differences betweenvisual content congruency (through pictures) and textualcongruency (through news texts) to test for differenteffects of both website contents. In the current study, par-ticipants were confronted with a real news portal websitein which the banner and the content was matched with the

advertisement by (1) both the picture and the text of themain article (2) only the picture for the main article, (3)only the text of the main article, or (4) not fitted at all(control condition). The findings are discussed with regardto their implications for research on context congruency aswell as for advertisers in general.

Online and Post Hoc Measures forResearch on Context–Ad Congruency

Online Measures

In addition to the effects of advertising shown afterexposure, the context (Web page content) in whichan ad is placed influences its ‘‘online’’ effectiveness(Sieglerschmidt, 2008). To investigate these online effects,the click-through rate is often applied (Novak & Hoffman,1997). However, Briggs and Hollis (1997) claim banners tohave a positive effect even before clicking the ad. Forexample, Cho (2004) concludes that the congruencebetween editorial content and banner increases the click-through rate, but he also posits that banners cause a mem-ory effect before the ad is clicked and without the customerexplicitly looking for the website of the product or thebrand. Therefore, it is emphasized that ‘‘the use of click-through rates alone are likely to undervalue the web as anadvertising medium’’ (Briggs & Hollis, 1997, p. 44).

Eye tracking enables us to investigate the more subtleand early stages of attention and information processing.Eye movements can give concrete information about therecipient’s focus of attention (Bente, 2004). To accountfor the effect of congruent environments, context effectswere also found concerning visual attention. A context thatis both visually and textually congruent leads to an earlierfixation and elaboration of a stimulus (Balota & Rayner,1983; Rayner & Pollatsek, 1992). The context facilitatesword perception and allows decreased dependency onvisual information.

It is generally assumed that during a fixation, the locusof the next fixation is already fixed. The reader is assumedto be minimally sampling the text to find words that arebased on the context (Goodman, 1967). The access to therepresentation of words in memory is facilitated by contex-tual cues via (1) an associative priming mechanism (Meyer,Schvaneveldt, & Ruddy, 1975) or (2) by partial cuesobtained from parafoveal vision interacting with context(McConkie & Rayner, 1976). While foveally acquiredinformation (i.e., in focal awareness) is processed for fur-ther elaboration, this is not certain for parafoveally acquiredinformation (i.e., outside focal awareness) (Levens, 1991).Pieters and Wedel (2008) note that the area of awarenessis rather small, and objects outside the focused area arenot identified or recalled reliably. Nevertheless, the contextin which the object is embedded can determine the acquisi-tion of parafoveally acquired visual information. It enablesthe reader to use fewer visual cues to more rapidly processthe text.

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In advertising research, eye-tracking studies areused to analyze visual awareness of advertised products.For instance, Rosbergen, Pieters, and Wedel (1997) showedthat interest in the product could be revealed through eyegaze data. It is therefore interesting to see if the contentof a website can influence the amount of awarenessinvested in a banner ad and thereby lead to an integrationof the banner area into the visual awareness of the potentialcustomer. Since the acquisition of visual information onlytakes place during fixations, those fixations also serve aspredictors for memory effects (Krugman et al., 1994;Pieters & Wedel, 2008; Rayner & Castelhano, 2008)because they can serve as a ‘‘proxy’’ for mental attention(Gentry, 2007).

There are few studies in advertising research that useeye tracking as a method to get deeper insights into theprocess of how awareness of the banner is increased.On Web pages, users are exposed to various stimuli wheresynergetic effects of multiple symbol systems are possible(Bente, 2004; Bente, Eschenburg, & F�rtjes, 2007). Ban-ner ads compete for attention with other simultaneouslypresented stimuli on the Web page, such as the root con-tent (articles and stories). This content includes textualstimuli as well as visual stimuli such as graphics, pictures,or videos which attract the user’s attention. In the study byJanssens et al. (2012), banner ads were either presentedbefore exposure to the Web page, during Web page expo-sure (via pop-ups), or simultaneously with the rest of theWeb page. The results demonstrated that congruencybetween the banner and the Web page is beneficial whendivided attention (and gaze jumps) are low. Based on thisline of research, we proposed that in the condition with abanner ad that is congruent to the content of the website itis placed on, participants will pay more visual attentionto the ad than in a condition with an incongruentbanner.

Hypothesis 1 (H1): In the condition with a banner adthat is congruent to the content of the website, partic-ipants will pay more visual attention to the ad than ina condition with an incongruent banner.

Post Hoc Measures

Other methods to investigate the effects of an advertisementrely on memory traces (retention) and attitudes toward theadvertisement or the advertised product. For instance, Yi(1991) found that prior exposure to contextual elementscan prime or activate certain product attributes. He furtherdemonstrated that the specific attributes relevant in evaluat-ing the advertised product vary in accessibility as a functionof the ad context. A media context that emphasized oneparticular interpretation of an automobile attribute (e.g.,size) resulted in greater salience for the primed interpreta-tion (e.g., higher gas consumption, more comfort) (Yi,1990). The most interesting goal for marketing strategists,

however, is to achieve a memory trace through contextualadjustment. For static as well as for online media, resultsare mixed. While Furnham, Gunter, and Richardson(2002) found a decline in memory effects when advertisingwas placed within a similar television program, congruencein print magazines has been shown to lead to positive mem-ory effects (Crowley & Hoyer, 1994; Moorman, Neijens, &Smit, 2002; Norris & Colman, 1992). For online advertis-ing, some findings have revealed a positive relationbetween congruent banner advertisements and memoryeffects. The results indicated that a longer exposure timeto Web pages led to a better recall of banner advertisements(Danaher & Mullarkey, 2003). Another line of researchsuggests that when ads are markedly different from the con-tent of the site, they might stimulate more effort as userswork toward an important goal, and consequently makeusers remember more about both the website and the ad(McCoy et al., 2004). Results indicating a decreased reten-tion are often explained by input interference (Tulving &Arbuckle, 1966). Dahl�n, Rosengren, Tçrn, and �hman(2008) reported less attention to, and less memory of, anadvertisement when it was placed in a congruent magazinecontext. In a recent study, Zanjani, Diamond, & Chan(2011) could shape this pattern by showing that task orien-tation played a crucial role in the effectiveness of a bannerad: While surfers (i.e., with no clear intention) had a betterretention of the ad, information seekers did not. Since in ourstudy, the instruction was to ‘‘scan’’ the page without aclear task, we hypothesized that:

Hypothesis 2 (H2): Participants would remember thebanner advertisement better when it was congruent tothe content of the Web page.

While deriving H1 and the effects of gaze parameters, itwas postulated that fixations are associated with informationprocessing (Pieters & Wedel, 2008) – that is, the more fixa-tions a banner advertisement gets, the more information fromthis banner can be gathered. Therefore, we hypothesized:

Hypothesis 3 (H3): A positive relationship betweenthe visual awareness of the advertisement and thememory effects the ad could evoke.

Furthermore, congruent banners have positive effects onproduct awareness, evaluation of the ad, and attitude towardthe product (Cho, 2004; De Pelsmacker, Geuens, & Ancka-ert, 2002; Ducoffe, 1995, 1996; Jeong & King, 2010).Based on the explanation of a priming effect, research alsofound more positive ad and brand effects when the contextwas congruent to the advertisement (Aaker & Brown, 1972;Dahlen, 2005; Yi, 1990, 1993). Further, concerning attitudetoward the webpage, it has also been empirically demon-strated that the perceived effectiveness of an ad is positivelycorrelated with the users’ attitudes toward the site (Coulter,Zaltman, & Coulter, 2001). These authors argue that someads are positively perceived when they seem related to the

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user’s tasks and do not interrupt the intended activity.Therefore, we hypothesized:

Hypothesis 4a (H4a): that the user’s attitude towardthe overall website.

Hypothesis 4b (H4b): the banner advertisement.

Hypothesis 4c (H4c): as well as to the advertisedproduct will be better when the banner ad is placedin a congruent context.

Visual vs. Textual Information

Further, from current research on the topic, it remainsunclear which particular aspects lead to context congruencyeffects. On the continuum from superficial association ofadvertising elements (e.g., pictures, visual congruency) todeeper processing and evaluation of advertising information(e.g., information in text form, textual congruency) in hybridmedia, both visual and textual elements have an effect.

In hybrid media, such as the Internet, multimodal infor-mation competes for the attention of the user (Bente et al.,2007). Pictures and text elements may have different effectson the perception of a certain stimulus when they appearmatched to a corresponding advertisement.

In a display which contains both pictures and text, initialattention is drawn to the picture because its activationis stronger and faster due to superficial associations.The often-quoted recommendation to place pictures to com-plement the text is mostly explained by dual-encoding the-ory (Paivio, 1986). This theory appears valid for printmedia, as long as the perception of elements is driven bypictorial impressions (Bente, 2004; O’Toole, 2000) but doesnot cover the specifics of media that are used for informa-tion-seeking purposes. Studies on the reception of Internetchoices using eye tracking have put into question whetherinformation selection and elaboration as well as attentionalprocesses follow similar mechanisms to those found forprint media. Ellis et al. (1998) could not replicate findingsof a dominance of attention for visual elements on websitesbut found that users applied more attention toward textualcontent. This is in line with the Stanfort-Poynter study(O’Toole, 2000), which found that most attention wasfocused on text elements in new media (content-directedattention). The authors explain their results by emphasizingthe interactive characteristics of the Internet. Users followtheir own interests when surfing the Web. They have nofixed program to follow, so they focus more on their ownpreferences. With reference to online media, the aforemen-tioned superiority of pictures may apply, but only withregard to the primary scan-path a user follows when scan-ning the website (Josephson & Holmes, 2002; Noton &Stark, 1971). Thus, for primary scanning, superficialassociation paths provided by visual information such aspictures or graphics may get beneficial visual awareness.

This is largely because the locus of attention isdetermined by low-level aspects of the stimulus (Rayner& Pollatsek, 1992). Eye-catching characteristics, such asmovement or colorful stimuli, arouse more attention, whichhas always been a key factor on how advertisements arebuilt. Nevertheless, cognitive processes can also intervenein terms of high-level mechanisms and guide attentiontoward informational aspects of the stimulus to enrich priorknowledge and understanding. It is therefore assumed thatbefore saccadic movements toward the interesting stimulusoccur, a general orientation is conducted to clarify theimportance of the stimulus. Visual attention can be consid-ered to pass two hierarchical levels. Treisman and Gelade(1980) put this idea forward by claiming that aspects ofthe stimulus are first perceived automatically and in parallelthroughout the whole visual area at a very early, so calledpreattentive state. The observed scene is coded by primitivecomponents such as color, size, and brightness.

Only in the second attentive state are individual dimen-sions of the stimulus put together to create meaning. Thismay result in diverging amounts of attention during dwelltime on a website, dependent on the type of Web page. Adifferentiation between initial scanning and exact analysisof a visual stimulus is central to eye movement research.Merely computing mean values for both phases may leadto misinterpretation (Bente et al., 2007). For instance, ana-lyzing navigation behaviors, Ollermann, Hambourg, andReinecke (2004) differentiated between e-shops (e.g., Ama-zon.de), online magazines (e.g., Spiegel-online.de, a Ger-man news portal), and online newspapers (e.g., Faz.de, aGerman newspapers). They could show that elements oftextual information are mostly viewed in online newspa-pers, whereas elements containing navigation informationwere viewed dominantly for e-shops. The results for onlinenews portals (which were used in the current study) predictattention on graphical elements to be limited to the first sec-onds of exposure to the Web page. The fixation of textualinformation elements increases with the dwell time on theonline magazine Web page (Ollermann et al., 2004). Ittherefore seems important to distinguish different phasesduring website inspection. Feature-integrating theory (Tre-isman & Gelade, 1980) posits differences in attention,depending on time and relevance of the stimulus. Basedon this, we assumed (1) that pictures and text elementsmay contribute differentially to visual attention to the ban-ner ad, and (2) that there is diverging visual attentiontoward the banner advertisement over the time spent on awebsite. Therefore, we posed the following two researchquestions:

Research Question 1 (RQ1): Do congruency effectsdiffer depending on the nature of the congruency(picture–ad congruency vs. text–ad congruency)?

Research Question 2 (RQ2): Are there differences invisual awareness of the banner ad, depending on con-text congruency and the time spent on the website?

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Method

Overview

To test whether different levels of context congruency in anonline environment have an effect on a banner’s effective-ness, we used a 4 (context congruency) · 1 factorial designwith (1) the visual context, (2) the textual context, or (3)both congruent with the advertisement, and as a controlcondition (4), we chose a situation where neither contextwas congruent, with a completely different topic.To account for different context manipulations, we decidedto modify existing websites according to our experimentaldesign. Dependent variables were visual awareness of thebanner, memory effects, and several attitude measures.We used a forced exposure design, however, to reliablycompare visual awareness as well as retention and attitudemeasures based on the same exposure style and exposuretime. To further answer our RQ2, visual attention on theadvertisement was calculated for four different time inter-vals. Time intervals were chosen based on research thatidentified the first 10 s of Web page exposure to be associ-ated with a first orientation (phase of conscious orienta-tion), and 30 s to represent the phase of intensive contact(Bente et al., 2007). Based on these two intervals, wedecided to split the dwell time into units of 10 s and there-fore analyzed the phase of conscious orientation (1 s to 10s), and additional time intervals (from 10 s to 20 s, and 20 sto 30 s). In this analysis, we used a 4 (context congruency)· 3 (time interval) repeated measures design.

One hundred twenty-nine subjects participated in thisstudy and were assigned randomly to the experimental con-ditions. Due to technical problems (glasses, contact lenses,head movements) during eye tracking or calibration,25 subjects were excluded from further analyses.The remaining 104 participants consisted of 37 male and67 female participants, 70.2% were students, the rest hadalready finished their studies. Sex was equally distributedover the conditions, v2(3) = 2.81, ns. Mean age was26.77 years (SD = 7.62).

Sample Banner Ads and Websites

To create a realistic and relevant stimulus material, thewebsites of three popular German news portals – namely,Spiegel-online.de, Stern.de, and Focus.de – were selected.

In the study, participants were exposed to screenshots ofall pages, on which the main articles and the banner adver-tisements were replaced by material adapted to the researchconditions. The size of the article texts selected for theexperiment was fitted to the screen, and no scrolling wasneeded. To test the hypotheses and research questions,the amount of congruent context information was varied.Specifically, the theme of the main article of the secondwebsite (Spiegel-online.de) was varied. The first Web page(http://www.focus.de) and the third one (http://www.stern.de) served as distractor pages and were identicalfor all subjects. However, to ensure that the automotivetopic did not lead to special effects, we used another caradvertisement on the stern website and a toothpaste banneron the focus website. Variation of the congruency ofthe main article meant fitting the corresponding pictureand/or the text of the main article to a banner advertisementwhich promoted a new electric car which had not yet beenreleased at the time. In one additional condition, no congru-ent context information was apparent. This resulted in fourtreatment conditions: a combined context congruency con-dition, a purely visual-based context condition, a purelytext-based context condition, and one incongruent condi-tion. Context congruency served as a between-subject fac-tor. All other material presented on the Web pageremained the same across experimental conditions.The contents of pictures and main articles in the differentexperimental conditions are listed in Table 1.

Procedure

The three starting pages of the websites were presented for30 s each with a blank slide of 2 s between each page. Thus,the exposure times to the Web pages were fixed to avoidpossible confounding effects. Mean dwell times on the ori-ginal websites were first tested in a pretest of comparablestimulus complexity. Only the second page varied acrosstreatment conditions (see example in the Appendix).

During the experiments, participants were comfortablyseated at a desk, at a distance of about 60 cm from a 17-in.computer display (1,280 · 1,024 pixel resolution). Eachsession started with the eye movement calibration proce-dure. Participants were asked to scan the websites as theywould do at home (see also Janssens et al., 2012). Afterwatching the three websites consecutively, they were askedto fill out a questionnaire, and then thanked and rewardedwith sweets and beverages.

Table 1. Contextual adaptation in the four different experimental conditions

Extent of congruence Picture Text

Complete congruence Car at trade fair Electric car at trade fairPictorial congruence Car at trade fair German consumer behaviorTextual congruence Building of Frankfurt Trade Fair Electric car at trade fairIncongruence Galactic universe Discovery of a new planet

Note. Description of the topic of the main article and the corresponding picture.

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Measures

Eye Gaze Data

We used the Tobii 1750 eye tracker (with screen resolutionof 1,280·1,024 pixels) and ClearView 2.7.1 during thisexperiment to track the participants’ eyes and to recordthe gaze data. Eye gaze data were analyzed with SiteSnap,a software package that computes metrics out of individualtime series data (Bente et al., 2007). This software allowsquantitative analyses through aggregation of persons (par-ticipants), spatial areas (areas of interest [AOIs]), and overtime (Rosbergen, 1998). The AOIs were identified withineach page. The metrics computed for each AOI were per-centage of time and number of fixations. Whereas percent-age of time is regarded a parameter to measure the depth ofelaborations in an AOI (Bente et al., 2007; Just &Carpenter, 1976), number of fixations is related to the num-ber of components that the user is required to process, butnot the depth of required processing (Goldberg & Kotval,1999). Mackworth and Morandi (1967) made comparisonsbetween visual fixations and verbal estimates as a measureof the relative importance of regions within photographs.They found that the regions that were rated highly for infor-mativeness produced the highest fixation frequency.

We only included analyses for the area where the ban-ner advertisement was placed, because all hypotheses con-cerned visual attention and information processing of theadvertising. Parameters were calculated for the whole timeof website exposure and further for different time intervals.

Memory Data

Memory data were recorded for unaided recall questions aswell as for aided recall (recognition). The unaided recallconsisted of two questions, the first asking what the partic-ipant remembered on the website (Recall Website) and thesecond asking more specifically what advertising contentthe participant remembered on the website (Recall Adver-tising). Two raters independently evaluated the answersfor both questions (inter-rater reliability j = 0.92) on anordinal scale ranging from 0 (no recall) to 2 (detailed recall,exact product). ‘‘No recall’’ was coded whenever partici-pants did not mention the advertisement at all, ‘‘somerecall’’ was coded whenever participants named the adver-tisement to be a car, and ‘‘detailed recall’’ was coded when-ever participants named the car to be a Nissan, or even aNissan Leaf, or named specific details such as ‘‘a neweco-friendly hybrid car.’’

Additional ad recognition was tested using aided recall.The aided recall was differentiated into aided recall for adtopic, and for car brand.

Attitude Measures

Attitudes were split up into three subcategories (Chen &Wells, 1999) – namely, attitude toward the site, towardthe banner ad, and toward the product. Attitude measures

were collected using a 5-point Likert scale. Attitude towardthe site was measured using 15 items – for example,‘‘The web page was. . . [actual/professional/informative].’’Attitude toward the banner ad was measured using 12 items– for example, ‘‘The banner ad was. . . [professional/appealing/interesting].’’ And finally, attitude towardthe product was measured with 13 items – for example,‘‘The advertised product was. . . [interesting/boring/appealing].’’ Cronbach’s alpha showed the scales to be reli-able (attitude toward the site: a = .91, attitude toward thebanner ad: a = .85, attitude toward the product: a = .89).

Confounding Factors

We included Need for Cognition (Cacioppo, Petty,Feinstein, & Jarvis, 1996) and Issue Involvement (Zaichowsky,1985), as well as the relevance of the automotive topic aspossible moderators. The relevance was measured by askingif participants had a car or were planning to buy a car, wereinterested in electric cars, and if they liked the NissanLeaf.

Manipulation Checks

Since the distractor pages were only included to simulate amore natural browsing behavior, memory or attitude mea-sures for the distractors are not reported in this paper.To test if our context manipulation was successful, we ana-lyzed eye gaze data for both distractor pages. For Stern.de,no differences in visual awareness toward the banner werefound: percentage of time, F(3, 103) = 1.14, ns, and num-ber of fixations, F(3, 103) = 1.13, ns. For the second dis-tractor, Focus.de, again no differences in visual awarenesswere found: percentage of time, F(3, 103) = 0.10, ns, andnumber of fixations, F(3, 103) = 0.26, ns. Neither the rele-vance of the automotive topic, v2(3) = 4.00, ns, nor theneed for cognition, nor the issue involvement differedbetween the experimental conditions, Fs < 1.

Results

Visual Awareness

Data were analyzed using ANOVAs with Context Congru-ency as a between-subject factor. As predicted, theANOVA showed significant differences between condi-tions related to the parameter percentage of time, F(3,103) = 5.18, p < .01, g2

p = .13, and the parameter numberof fixations, F(3, 103) = 5.91, p < .001, g2

p = .15. Pairwisecomparisons (Bonferroni) showed significant differencesbetween the website on which the context was visuallyand textually congruent to the advertisement and all otherconditions (Table 2). The data confirmed H1 insofar asbanners that were textually and visually congruent receivedmore visual attention than incongruent banners. They,

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however, also attracted more attention than banners whichwere only textually or only visually congruent.

Visual Awareness in the Time Courseof Website Exposure

For visual awareness in the time course of website exposurea 4 (Context Congruency: complete vs. visual vs. textual vs.incongruence) · 3 (Website Exposure: 1–10 s vs. 11–20 svs. 20–30 s) ANOVA was calculated with Website Expo-sure as within-subject factor and Context Congruency serv-ing as between-subject factor. Concerning percentage oftime, there was a significant main effect for Context Con-gruency, F(3, 100) = 5.48, p < .01, g2

p = .14. There wasalso a significant main effect for Website Exposure,F(1.50, 149.89) = 4.16, p < .05, g2

p = 04. The interactionbetween Website Exposure and Context Congruency failedto reach significance, F(4.50, 149.89) = 1.84, p = .12,g2

p = .14. Pairwise comparisons (Least Squared Differ-ences; LSD), however, revealed significant differencesbetween the levels of context congruency for severalinstances during website exposure (see Fig. 1). The suprem-acy of a combined context over all other context variables

(between 20 and 30 s of website exposure) is shown inFigure 1.

For the parameter number of fixations, there was a sig-nificant main effect for Context Congruency, F(3,100) = 5.84, p < .001, g2

p = .15. There was also a signifi-cant main effect for Website Exposure, F(1.44,144.01) = 6.27, p < .01, g2

p = 06. The interaction alsoreached significance, F(4.32, 144.01) = 2.52, p < .05,g2

p = .07. Pairwise comparisons (LSD) revealed the samepattern as was found for the parameter percentage of time.A complete context congruency already led to more visualawareness of the advertisement between 10 and 20 s ofwebsite exposure (compared with the incongruence condi-tion, p < .05). A general supremacy of a complete contextcongruency in terms of attention paid to the banner wasnevertheless achieved between 20 and 30 s (complete con-gruence compared with other conditions, all ps � .01).

These results show an increase in visual awareness ofthe advertisement, at least for the complete congruencycondition. To further support the idea that this was due toa context priming with the automotive topic, we also ana-lyzed visual awareness over the time course for the areaof the main article (i.e., the one that was manipulated tobe congruent to the ad). For the parameter percentage oftime, there was a significant main effect for Website Expo-sure, F(1.85, 185.24) = 15.71, p < .001, g2

p = .14. Neitherthe main effect for Context Congruency, nor the interactionreached significance, both Fs < 1. The percentage of timespent on this area linearly decreased over dwell time, Flinear

(1, 00) = 17.31, p < .001, g2p = .15. While during the first

10 s, participants spent 41.22% of their time on the mainarticle, this percentage decreased to 21.75% between 10and 20 s, and to 22.86% between 20 and 30 s.

Recall

Recall was measured using both unaided recall as well asrecognition. The unaided recall was subdivided into two ques-tions. The Kruskal-Wallis test was used to analyze the effect.Significant differences between the conditions were revealed

Figure 1. Means for percent-age of time during differentsequences of website expo-sure. Numbers with differentalphabetic characters in acolumn differed significantlyin the pairwise comparisons(p < .05). Standards errorsare represented by the errorbars.

Table 2. Post hoc tests between the experimentalconditions for eye-tracking parameters

Percentage oftime

Number offixations

Context congruency n M (SE) M (SE)

Complete congruency 26 3.13a (0.50) 3.44a (0.49)Visual congruency 26 0.72b (0.50) 0.90b (0.49)Textual congruency 26 1.27ab (0.50) 1.68ab (0.49)Incongruence 26 0.79bc (0.50) 0.87bc (0.49)

Note. Numbers with different alphabetic characters in a columndiffered significantly in the pairwise comparisons (p < .01).

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for Recall Website, H(3) = 11.81, p < .01, and also for themore specific Recall Advertising, H(3) = 7.58, p = .05.Recall of the website content in general and of the advertisingwere significantly affected by context variations. Singlecomparisons using the Mann-Whitney test demonstrated thatthe complete congruency condition led to higher Recall of theWebsite than the other conditions (see Table 3). A similar pat-tern was found for Recall of the Advertising; however, onlythe comparison between the complete congruency conditionand the incongruence condition reached significance( p < .05). The Jonckheere-Terpstra test showed a linear trendfor Recall of the Website, p = .04. For Recall of the Advertis-ing, this linear trend became marginally significant, p = .09.Recall was highest in the complete congruency condition,followed by the textual congruency and visual congruencycondition. Recall was worst in the incongruence controlcondition.

For the aided recall, the chi-square test was used to testwhether the participants recognized the ad topic and the carbrand. For ad topic, there was no significant effect of theexperimental condition, v2(3) = 4.19, p = .24. Participantsdid not differ with regard to their recognition of the ad topicamong conditions. However, there was a significant effecton recognition of the car brand, v2(3) = 11.53, p = .009,Cram�r’s V = .33. Participants in the complete congruencycondition recognized the car brand significantly more often(38.5%), than those in the visual congruency condition(3.8%), in the textual congruency condition (19.2%) andin the incongruence control condition (11.5%). Hypothesis 2was thus partially supported.

Interdependency Between Visual Awarenessand Recall

The correlation between visual awareness and recall wasanalyzed. Spearman’s bivariate correlation coefficientrevealed significant results for eye-tracking parametersand unaided recall questions (see Table 4). There were sig-nificant correlations between both eye-tracking parameters

and both questions for the unaided recall. Hypothesis 3 wasthus supported; the more visual attention a recipient direc-ted toward an advertisement, the better he or she remem-bered the advertisement.

Attitude Measures

There were no significant differences for attitude towardthe site, F < 1. However, the attitude toward the adrevealed marginally significant differences between condi-tions, F(3, 103) = 2.65, p = .053, g2

p = .07. Pairwise com-parisons depicted a significant difference between thecomplete congruency condition and the visual, as well asthe incongruent condition. The textually congruent bannerled to a better attitude toward the banner than incongruentbanners did (see Table 5). H4a was thus supported. Similar,yet nonsignificant, results were found for the attitudetoward the product, F(3, 103) = 2.09, p = .107, g2

p = .06.Comparing the means there was a trend for the completecongruency condition to lead to a better attitude towardthe product. However, H4b was not supported by the data.

Discussion

This study explored the impact of context congruency onvisual awareness, memory, and attitudes. Related to visual

Table 3. Post hoc tests between the experimental conditions for unaided recall variables

Conditions Mean rank

Variables A B A B U z p r

Recall Website 1 2 30.63 22.37 230.50 �2.89 .004 �0.401 3 28.63 24.37 282.50 �1.28 .202 �0.181 4 30.10 22.90 244.50 �2.41 .016 �0.332 3 23.98 29.02 272.50 �2.03 .043 �0.282 4 25.98 27.02 324.50 �0.61 .541 �0.083 4 28.42 24.58 288.00 �1.46 .144 �0.20

Recall Advertising 1 2 29.35 23.65 264.00 �1.90 .057 �0.261 3 27.19 25.81 320.00 �0.41 .679 �0.061 4 29.73 23.27 254.00 �2.24 .025 �0.312 3 24.27 28.73 280.00 �1.55 .122 �0.212 4 27.00 26.00 325.00 �0.47 .641 �0.073 4 29.15 23.85 269.00 �1.92 .055 �0.27

Note. Conditions: 1 = complete congruency, 2 = visual congruency, 3 = textual congruency, 4 = incongruence.

Table 4. Bivariate correlations (Spearman’s q) betweenvisual awareness parameters and unaided recallquestions

Recall Website Recall Advertising

Percentage of time .456* .533*Number of fixations .457* .531*

Note. *p < .01.

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awareness, memory, and attitude, positive effects of contextcongruency were found. This is in line with previous stud-ies (Balota & Rayner, 1983; Cho, 2004; Shamdasani,Stanaland, & Tan, 2001) which also showed a beneficialeffect of context congruency on several aspects that ledto a positive evaluation of the advertisement. Concerningvisual awareness in particular, we found that a website con-text with the main article made congruent to the advertise-ment by both the picture information and the textinformation led to an increase in visual attention. Ourresults are thereby in line with those of Janssens et al.(2012), who also demonstrated positive effects on a congru-ent ad when gaze jumps were low. Further, our study wasable to extend these previous studies by investigating con-text congruency in news portals that are made for the gen-eral public and do not serve special interests. Our findingsthereby demonstrated that context congruency can also takeplace when only certain – yet important – elements of astarting page are matched to the advertisement – namely,the picture and the text of the main article.

According to Nielsen and Pernice (2010), the imagesthat are looked at most are the ones most highly relatedto the content on the page. Our results suggested that a con-text congruency priming effect was stronger for the com-plete congruency condition because the images were abetter fit to both the content of the page and the advertisedproduct. A both visual and textual congruent context wasable to counter the banner blindness effect and at least par-tially reintegrate the ad. However, the crucial prerequisitesfor context effects are revealed when considering differenttime sequences of website exposure.

The results give insight into the processing of advertis-ing dependent on absolute time spent on the website. In thefirst stage of website scanning, no differences between dif-ferent contexts emerged. In terms of feature-integrating the-ory (Treisman & Gelade 1980), in the preattentive state,object recognition is obtained by superficial elements.Pictures (perceived parafoveally) may function as periphe-ral cues for informative, congruent elements (such as theadvertisement). However, the impact of congruent picturesalone remains unclear. The visual context congruent web-site failed to direct more attention toward the banner ad.It was assumed that especially in the first stage of websiteexposure, a beneficial effect of congruent visual informa-tion could lead to more visual awareness (Ollermannet al., 2004).

Whereas initial scanning and orientation might be thesame in all content variations, fixations of text elementsaccumulate with longer website exposure (Ollermannet al., 2004). Between 10 and 20 s of website exposure, sig-nificant differences in percentage of time between the com-pletely congruent and the incongruent website indicate adeeper processing of contextual information, but only whenboth visual and textual context information is congruent.These results provide evidence for the occurrence of apriming effect: Complete context congruency fosters anincrease in visual awareness over dwell time. Results foundfor visual awareness of the main article further support thisidea, as visual awareness on the article decreased overdwell time. However, future studies should use eye trackingand analyze reading-time-specific parameters to investigatewhether participants really read the information.

Apart from a priming effect which first led users to payattention to a congruent banner, our results also replicatedfindings from the Stanford-Poynter study (O’Toole, 2000)by demonstrating the importance of congruent textual infor-mation. In interactive media, users can actively seek textsand choose what they read. After first superficial scanningand conscious orientation (Bente et al., 2007), it can be sug-gested that context congruency with regard to textual infor-mation has a bigger impact when dwell times on a webpageare longer.

In line with this idea, our results concerning visualawareness in the time sequence between 20 and 30 s indi-cate that participants in the complete congruency conditionturned more to textual information. Since the combinedcongruency condition explained the main effects in thistime sequence, it could be argued that a feature integration,where the information about electric cars in the banner adand congruent car-related information in the main articlewere recognized and integrated as information, could onlytake place after the processing of the actual content(Treisman & Gelade, 1980). Both visual parametersrevealed significant differences in this time sequence, indi-cating a supremacy regarding interest and elaboration ofany kind of context matching over the incongruent websitecondition. This result indicates the necessity of furtherexploring the distinction between visual and textual infor-mation during website exposure. Our results thereby alsoinform feature-integrating theory (Treisman & Gelade,1980) to distinguish between different modalities whenlooking at different attentional states. Contextual primingmight trigger different systems depending on cue (textualvs. visual) and also exposure time. In different stages ofinformation processing, distinct modalities might becomeimportant. This idea can be interpreted in terms of differentlevels of processing (see Craik & Lockhart, 1972).

Regarding memory effects, our results demonstrated abetter memory of the ads when the context was congruent(H2). However, they also suggest that context effects onlyoccur consistently when both text and picture informationare adapted. This finding was mirrored in unaided recall,as well as being confirmed in part by results from ad recog-nition. This is thereby in line with results by Moorman andcolleagues (2002), who demonstrated positive effects formemory in the case of a congruent context in print media.

Table 5. Single comparison post hoc tests for attitudemeasures

Attitude toward the banner

Context congruency n M (SE)

Complete congruency 26 3.18a (0.17)Visual congruency 26 2.80b (0.17)Textual congruency 26 2.86ab (0.17)Incongruence 26 2.74bc (0.17)

Note. Numbers with different alphabetic characters in a columndiffered significantly in the pairwise comparisons (p < .05).

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Further, consistent with the results of Danaher andMullarkey (2003), a correlation between visual awarenessparameters and memory was found (H3). The more visualattention a recipient paid toward an advertisement, the bet-ter he or she remembered the advertisement. Due to morevisual awareness of the banner ad on the complete congru-ent website, the same context variation led to better recalleffects. Consequently, this connection is also revealed bycorrelational data.

The last factors considered in this study were attitudestoward the site, the advertisement, and the product. In thisstudy, no effect of congruent context on attitude toward thesite was found (H4a). However, given that we used afamous German news portal as stimulus material, thiswas not completely unexpected: Attitudes toward stimuli(such as news portals one uses every day) are best reflectedby habituation processes and not expected to change due toa single exposure. For attitude toward the advertisement, amarginally significant effect was found (H4b), indicating amore positive attitude toward the ad when both textual andvisual context congruency appeared. This trend was alsoapparent for the attitude toward the product (H4c) but didnot reach statistical significance. In accordance with thedual mediation model (Brown & Stayman, 1992), whichassumes a coherency between the attitude toward an adver-tisement and a brand, the results showed the same pattern ofresults for attitude toward the ad and attitude toward theproduct. The congruent context may increase the value ofthe advertisement and the advertised product (Ducoffe,1996), but some further testing is needed to confirm this.In future studies, it would be very interesting to pretestthe attitude toward the ad and the product, independent ofdifferent context manipulations, and compare the resultsto find out whether a congruent context may lead to attitudechange.

Limitations

First, this study had some limitations regarding its method-ology. Since we used real websites and fitted realistic con-tent on them, our design can be regarded as low in internalvalidity. Follow-up studies should therefore use more con-trolled stimulus material to really account for the effectsfound. However, the benefit of the chosen design was itsexternal validity. Participants reported a natural appearanceof the three websites because we used the real startinghome pages. Further, we only used three websites in ourexperiment with a context variation on only one of them.Although our focus was to measure visual awareness onstarting home pages with low special interest offers, futurestudies should use more websites and test different contextvariations in a repeated measures design to rule out the pos-sibility of single stimuli effects. Despite these limitations,our design addressed context congruency from a perspec-tive focusing on visual awareness and different timesequences. This made it important to restrict time spenton the website. Further, we accounted for many influencingvariables to rule out confounding factors.

Another limitation of our study lay in the static nature ofthe experimental setting. As we mentioned in the theorysection, the Internet is characterized by multimodal infor-mation, which also consists of – for example, videos orthe possibility of clicking on hyperlinks and browsingthrough the whole content on offer. In the present study,however, participants were asked to surf the starting pagefor 30 s. They did not get the change to click through thewhole website or even exit it. Although the strength ofour study was that we could compare visual attention forparticipants for the same dwell times, future studies shouldacknowledge the interactive nature of the Internet and useless static settings.

An editorial context congruent to a banner ad increasesthe effectiveness of the advertisement. However, the purelytextual congruency condition did not show superior visualawareness, better recall, or more positive attitudes overthe incongruent condition; some important cues about theprocess and the elaboration need to lie within the picture.An assumed supremacy of textual over visual elementswithin a congruent context was suggested by our resultsbut needs some further confirmation. A future study shouldaddress a clearer distinction of both kinds of information toclarify their differences within a hybrid media context.The predominance of an effect in the condition where boththe article and the picture dealt with the automotive eco-friendly topic suggests evidence for the presence of a prim-ing effect which occurs due to the same topic of article andadvertisement. It should be explored further whether con-formity between the news on websites and the advertisedproduct leads to deeper information processing due toenhanced involvement with the product. Did the articleincrease involvement for eco-friendly vehicles? Did atten-tion on the advertisement in the last 10 s of exposureincrease due to involvement patterns? Further studies, onthe one hand, need to focus even more on the differencebetween textual and visual information processing bymanipulation of time spent on websites. If involvementplays a bigger role for online advertising, research intowhich mechanisms increase the involvement in a bannerad is needed. On the other hand, research should focus onthe advertised product and the existing product involvement(issue involvement). Shamdasani et al. (2001) have alreadymentioned different effect patterns for low- and high-involvement products, so the study should be repeated witha broader range of products.

Connected to this first limitation, former studies inves-tigating the effects of context congruency used fully con-gruent special interest Web pages, not just an adjustmentof the main article (see Janssens et al., 2012; Kim &Sundar, 2012). Our study aimed at testing congruencyeffects on non-special interest websites – namely, news por-tals. While these very natural websites increased the exter-nal validity of our approach, the findings of this study canonly cautiously be generalized to other types of websites.However, since we found congruency effects, even thoughonly a part of the website was adjusted, indicates therobustness of a context congruency effect.

In line with this, the current study did not explicitly testwhether context congruency was perceived. While the

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eye-tracking data between both distractor pages (no contextcongruency) and the target page implicitly suggest a con-text congruency effect, future studies should include anexplicit manipulation check by asking participants aboutperceived congruency.

In conclusion, our results extend former research byusing eye-tracking parameters to gain a deeper understand-ing of advertising effectiveness and context congruency indetail. Moreover, the findings show the importance ofstudying attention to media information via eye-trackingmethods. By combining eye-tracking and post hoc mea-surements, conclusions concerning attention, memory, andevaluation can be drawn. Advertisers already place theironline commercials in a corresponding context to increasethe quantitative perception of their products. Eye-trackingstudies lead to a deeper understanding of the process andhelp figure out qualitative differences. This technologyshould be further used to gain insights into the predisposi-tional factors that influence attention paid toward the adver-tisement, such as, for example, involvement in differentmessage types or topics, or even more practical issues, suchas placement, design, or advertising copy.

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Date of acceptance: June 12, 2014Published online: November 17, 2014

Diana Rieger (PhD, 2013) is a postdoc-toral researcher in media and communi-cation psychology at the University ofCologne. Her main research interests arethe use and positive outcomes of enter-tainment media, such as recovery, moodrepair, and well-being, and the effects ofextremist propaganda messages. She iscurrently editorial assistant for the Journalof Media Psychology.

Franzisca Bartz is a PhD student at theUniversity of Cologne. She is doing herdoctoral thesis in cooperation with theBMW Group. Her research focuses onhuman needs, their satisfiers, and theidentification of different mobility seg-ments in an intercultural context.

Gary Bente (PhD, 1985) is a professor formedia and communication psychology atthe University of Cologne and holds theposition of visiting professor in theCommunication Department at MichiganState University. His main researchinterest lies in the area of nonverbalcommunication and person perception inface-to-face and mediated encounters. Heis also interested in cognitive and emo-tional media effects, focusing on behav-

ioral measures such as psychophysiology, real-time responsemeasures, and eye tracking. He is coeditor of the GermanTextbook on Media Psychology and the editor-in-chief of theJournal of Media Psychology since 2010.

Diana RiegerDepartment of Psychology

University of CologneRichard-Strauss-Str. 2

50931 CologneGermany

E-mail diana.rieger@uni-koeln.de

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Appendix

Website With Complete Context Congruency Variation

Figure A1. Example of website for the complete congruence condition. Both the picture of the main article and the mainarticle itself deal with automotive topics. The article covers the topic of an eco-friendly car at the trade fair in Frankfurt.

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