A Cross-Cultural Study of intrusiveness and fluency effects of Web Ads

Advertising online has increasingly become an important marketing strategy. Along with the rising ad dollars invested on the web, marketers have also devised more powerful ad delivery tactics to garner online consumers’ attention. These powerful online advertising tactics may result in intrusiveness perceptions and processing fluency effects. As Westerners tend to focus on the focal object whereas East Asians tend to pay attention to the focal object and contextual background simultaneously when processing a visual scene, East Asians’ and Westerners’ culturally divergent visual processing styles would lead them to develop varying intrusiveness perceptions and experience differential processing fluency when exposed to web ads. Specifically, we propose that when a web ad’s visibility increases, Westerners will perceive it to be more intrusive than East Asians and East Asians will be more likely to experience perceptual and conceptual fluency to choose a product that is perceptually related to the web ad than Westerners. Designs of the experiment testing the propositions are discussed.