Online Ad Effectiveness (a Yahoo! study)

Dr. Jill Strawbridge, from the User Experience Lab at Yahoo! presented a talk entitled "Online Ad Effectiveness" at the "Clicking with the Human Mind" session at Advertising Week in Toronto. During her presentation, Dr. Jill covered an experiment Yahoo! conducted to decipher which demographic groups relaed better to different styles of online advertising. 

The three demographic groups consisted of Generation Y, Generation X, and the Baby Boomers.  The three different advertising styles under study were:

1. motion versus static ads
2. colour palette (warm, cool, grey)
3. border treatment (round, aquare or no border)

Here are a number of Dr. Jill's findings:

• GenY loves videos while the Baby Boomers couldn't care less.
• GenY loves warm colours; GenX prefers cool-grey
• Baby Boomers show little variability for all styles
• GenX recalls static ads beter than motion
• videos attract GenY but they tune out after a few seconds