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Introduction
Internet marketing is increasingly valued with the recent proliferation of e-commerce (Aljukhadar et al., 2020; Lim and Childs, 2020). Businesses striving for an “online-offline linkage effect” of the product have relied on online advertising to raise visibility among consumers. A common form of online advertising is a banner ad, which is rectangular graphic displays embedded into a website where users are directed to sponsor’s product page on clicking it (Manchanda et al., 2006). Research suggests that banner ads are conducive to brand awareness (Chatterjee, 2008) and customer loyalty (Lee et al., 2017). And they are gaining popularity among advertisers by virtue of their wide coverage and more interaction with consumers (Obal and Lv, 2017). This means that, instead of merely prompting clicks from users, banner ads are designed in a way as to print a product image in consumer memory via repeated exposures, thereby cementing the sponsor’s market position and growing a future consumer base. Therefore, improving memory for banner ads continues to be an inevitable theme in online marketing research.
Nevertheless, the communication of banner ads has been found to be obstructed by banner blindness, a phenomenon where consumers consciously or unconsciously ignore banner ads and even banner-like information (Sun et al., 2013). This occurs because consumers generally deem banner ads as invaluable distractions and tend to either avoid attention to the ads when they interact with web pages or quickly forget the ads after viewing them. Given that banner blindness has, to a high degree, reduced the intended attention to and memory for banner ads, there is a need to discuss factors that can be the potential cure to this phenomenon.
A critical venue to attract consumer attention, creative advertising can impress consumers so that the sponsor and its product build a stronger position in consumers’ mind and remain in their memory for long after the ad exposure (Chen et al., 2016; Ramezani Nia and Shokouhyar, 2020). Some scholars contend that creativity is one of the factors best representing the value of an ad (Koslow, 2015), as it promotes in-depth cognitive processing, stimulates a desire to understand the ad and, therefore, bring about better interaction and better advertising effectiveness outcomes such as an increase in attention and...