Can Gamified Display Ads Tackle Banner-Blindness?
(A2026-131711)

AUTHORS

Benjamin Klink, Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences; Sigrid Hofer-Fischer, Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences

ABSTRACT

Display advertisements are one of the most important forms of digital advertising. Despite their importance and substantial development of display ad technology, advertisers still struggle to attract the attention of internet users, the so-called “banner blindness” phenomenon. In this research we develop a new type of display ad based on gamification principles and investigate in a large-scale eye-tracking study whether these gamified display ads can effectively reduce banner blindness. Our results show that, overall, gamified display ads attract more attention than their conventional, non-gamified counterparts. However, gamified display ads unexpectedly exhibit lower interaction durations than the baseline ads when users pursue a particular goal, yet substantially longer interactions when users are freely browsing a website.