Using the P3a to gauge automatic attention to interactive television advertising

This paper is the first step to an understanding of how engagement with interactive television advertisements may increase the relevancy of a brand and therefore facilitate the automatic processing of the brand’s logo (measured via the P3a) after viewing the advertisement, compared to non-interactive television ads. Event-related potentials (ERPs) and attitudes were measured in response to advertisement-specific brands. ERP latencies and self-report measures were analysed with mixed design analysis of variance. P3a latency decreased for the brands associated with the longer interactive ads, but remained stable for the brands associated with the normal ads and increased for the control brands. This indicates that automatic attention was greater for those brands which were associated with the longer Dedicated Advertiser Location (DAL) interactive ads in the ad reel. The findings of this analysis suggest that brands associated with interactive ads do have more attention automatically allocated to them.