Title: Perception of humour banner advertising: a conceptual framework

Authors: Igor Makienko

Addresses: Department of Managerial Sciences, College of Business, University of Nevada Reno, 0028, Reno, Nevada, 89557, USA

Abstract: Online advertising has become a very popular and cost effective communication tool for marketers. However, humour banner advertising has never received attention from the researchers. We develop a conceptual framework of how consumers perceive humour banner advertising. When online consumers are not actively looking for a product and exposed to banners involuntarily, they try to minimise their cognitive efforts and process peripheral cues of the advertising message rather than the message content. Thus, they form preliminary attitudes toward the banner and the advertised brand based on the favourability of peripheral cues. As humour represents a strong executional cue and is the perfect attention-grabbing tool with a low-involved audience, in general, humour banner advertising is likely to be more effective in an online environment than non-humour banner advertising. We also discuss how content relevance between an advertised brand and the website, an individual's need for cognition and the type of consumer online behaviour moderate the effectiveness of humour banner advertising. An extensive literature review is used to identify the research findings that support our conceptual framework.

Keywords: internet advertising; humorous banner advertising; consumer involvement; click-through rate; advertising effectiveness; brand attitude; intention to click; cognition need; content relevance; online behaviour types; humour perceptions.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIMA.2014.066844

International Journal of Internet Marketing and Advertising, 2014 Vol.8 No.3, pp.181 - 198

Accepted: 21 Feb 2014
Published online: 24 Jan 2015 *

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