Visual attention to advertising: The impact of motivation and repetition

Using eye-tracking data, we examine the impact of motivation and repetition on visual attention to advertisements differing in argument quality. Our analyses indicate that repetition leads to an overall decrease in the amount of attention. However, while at first high motivation subjects attend to the ad for a longer time than low motivation subjects, this effect of motivation disappears after two exposures. More specifically, our results suggest that the second exposure counts most. In contrast, the order in which the ad elements am attended to is unaffected by repetition and motivation. Yet, the number of ad elements that are skipped becomes larger as the number of exposures increases. Implications of our results for theories of advertising repetition are formulated.