The Ecology of Perception: Why Where You Place Your Ads Matters

By Mike Follett, CEO of Lumen Research

In advertising, it’s not just about the ad itself, but where it appears. Recent research from The Daily Mail has shown that ads shown next to news stories get much more attention than the same ads shown next to non-news content. The right content amplifies the impact of the ads.

Why might this be? James Gibson’s (2) theory of the ‘ecology of perception’ offers valuable insights into how environment affects attention.

In his most famous work, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979), Gibson argued that our perception is shaped by both our aims and purposes as living creatures, and by the environment we find ourselves in. To make sense of the world, we are constantly moving and adjusting our view, seeing the same thing from different perspectives, to skilfully navigate the world around us.

The same principle applies to how we engage with ads. The environment a viewer is in dramatically influences whether or not they’ll pay attention to your ad, and what they will take out of it.

The Daily Mail research showed that when people are intently reading a news site, their attention is caught by the content and spills over to the accompanying ads. The slow scrolling of the reader means that the ads have long viewable times and are more likely to be noticed – and noticed for longer.

It’s unsurprising that this differs from the frantic scrolling of some social media sites, where the ads spin by at high speed, and attention levels can be quite low.

But it’s perhaps less obvious that the high attention to ads on news sites also differs from similar ad impressions served on ‘task orientated sites’ (such as weather apps or travel sites). On these sites, viewable times can also be very long, but people’s attention is dominated by the task at hand – learning if they need to take an umbrella, or finding the quickest way to Des Moines – meaning that they have fewer cognitive resources to spare for advertising.

Understanding the combined influence of advertising context and user intention is vitally important. Place your ads in the right environments, and you’ll see a dramatic increase in attention and engagement.