The effects of task demand and web information type on recognition of verbal emotional advertising

Studies report that users avoid looking at areas they consider to display advertising. The objective of the present study was to systematically investigate the influences of task demand, and web information type on recognition of verbal emotional advertising when people focus on a primary task. Our findings contribute important insights into preattentive procssing research. First, the empirical evidence implies that preattentive procssing can extract enough semantic information from nonfocal verbal stimuli to determine the emotional content of a nonfocal word. Second, the study suggests the driver of attentional interference effects may be impacted by the visual field. Finally, the comparison between text-based and picture-based webpage indicates that the recognition of positive emotional headlines outperforms the recognition of negative ones in the picture-based webpage. Headlines featuring high arousal words were recognized more often than headlines featuring low arousal words. These findings provide strategies of ad copy and placement for marketers.