In the world of user experience design, “Banner Blindness” refers to the tendency of web and app users to look past elements that seem like they might be advertisements.
In the wider, non-digital world, this concept is usually referred to as “Ad Blindness,” and it means roughly the same thing in tangible spaces: people ignore things in their environments that seem like ads, subconsciously looking right past even the loudest, most bizarre, visually shouty, overt messaging because those sorts of elements have come to be associated with (in many places, at least) marketing of various flavors.
There are many theories as to why this behavior emerged, both in its real-world and online manifestations, but most of them aggregate around the general idea that we seek valuable information in our (digital or tangible) environments, and after sufficient exposure to ads, we realize they don’t offer much in the way of value. Over time, then, we develop a sense of what ads usually look and sound and feel like, and that helps us passively elbow them aside so we can focus on other types of data.
In the early days of the internet, banner advertisements were incredibly effective: the first banner ad, which went live on hotwired.com in late-1994 had a click-through rate of about 44% over the course of four months.
That’s an astonishingly figure: most banner ads on Google, today, boast something like a 6% click-through rate, though that figure varies depending on where the ad is, what it’s for, and to whom it’s shown.
Over the years, as consumers of web content have become more savvy regarding the content they peruse, marketers have innovated in this space, mostly by evolving their formerly (relatively) calm and unassuming banners into flashier, animated, video-embedded, at times audibly booming versions of the same.
But while some of these new iterations have granted marketers a momentary boost in their click-through numbers, users have always become inured to their messaging, eventually.
The modern approach to advertising relies heavily on ads that don’t seem like ads.
Influencer marketing, for instance, might involve paying someone to feature a product or service on their social media profile, which can be effective because people scroll through and engage with such profiles to glean other sorts of content, and because these ads blend in with that non-ad content (in some cases even embedded within skits or other entertainments, product placement style), users are less likely to bypass them without being exposed to their messaging, first.
Native advertising, also called sponsored and promoted posts—ads that are dressed up to seem like blog posts or news articles—are camouflaged marketing messages meant to help advertisers dodge this look away reflex by pulling folks in with a familiar, value-valenced format (similar to influencer marketing, but in newspapers and blogs instead of social media profiles).
Interestingly, there’s evidence that even being adjacent to ads that are overtly marketing messages, like banner ads, can cause would-be viewers of that nearby, not-advertising content to skim over it, possibly because of our tendency to group information into meaningful chunks; we seek out some bundles of content and avoid others without individually assessing the elements of those groups.
The design of a website or app (or newspaper), then, can influence what we perceive and what we gloss over, because anything we associate with marketing or other messages we don’t care about, and anything placed close to that sort of content, may be passed over without us even realizing it, our eyes seeking the sorts of designs and layouts and verbiage we associate with the valuable media we actually want.
All of which tells us interesting things about how we approach information, the impact design choices and layout can have on our perception of what we encounter, the effect previous exposures to different sorts of marketing messages can have on us, and the Red Queen-like competition between advertisers and those they hope to reach—both of which are endlessly updating their operational knowledge in order to (in the case of the former) feed messages to people who don’t want to ingest them, and (in the case of the latter) avoid those messages whenever possible.