The Long-Term Effects of E-Advertising: The Influence of Internet Pop-ups Viewed at a Low Level of Attention in Implicit Memory

International audienceFaced with an abundance of advertising messages, Internet users allocate only minimal cognitive resources to advertising. What are the effects of pop-up ads for a new brand viewed at low-level attention, and then measured when the Internet users have forgotten having seen them? In the theoretical context of processing fluency and implicit memory, the experiment (n = 398) studied the effects of repeated brief exposure to different types of content (words/image) in pop-up ads 7 days and 3 months after exposure. The results show the overall positive effects of the pop-ups, the superiority of the image over words for effects on attitude toward the brand and the purchase intentions; but the words produce more semantic effects than the image. Faced with an abundance of advertising messages, Internet users occupied with their current task activate selective perception and processing strategies that lead them to allocate only minimal cognitive resources to advertising, which generally interests them very little. While in everyday life there is always a delay between the phase of exposure to an Internet ad about a brand and the moment when the individual finds himself in front of the product in a store, the vast majority of marketing communication studies do not take this into account, since they record people's judgments just minutes after exposure. This delay is too short and unrealistic. But, we do not know much about longer-term effects of advertising on judgments about the brand, particularly when consumers do not have any memory of ad content or even of having previously seen any ads for the brand. Despite the ubiquity of the Internet pop-ups, we know little about their psychological effects. The current experiment fills in this gap by studying the influences of pop-ups in a more ''ecological'' context of reception: While users are concentrating on