A lot of my high-tech B2B clients think if they put up some banner ads qualified leads will reign down on them. I tell them that isn’t my experience. But I stress they do help from a branding point-of-view and if they supplement the banner ads with email marketing and Webinar that they can achieve their desired results.

Why do I suggest this? Cause banner ads in study after study have shown they can successfully help build awareness. This thinking is reinforced by a recent study in the Journal of Consumer Research suggests that although individuals might not click on many of the the banner ads, we do subliminally register the products advertised there. What’s ever more interesting, the subliminal impression we gather is positive almost 100 percent of the time.

To test this, they asked students to read a multi-page essay under the assumption that they’d be answering questions on the essay’s content. Instead, the students were ultimately quizzed about a fictitious brand of camera, Pretec, that had appeared in banner ads on the pages that contained the essay. Different pools of students were exposed to Pretec ads zero, five, or 20 times.

Afterwards, when asked about their negative feelings towards the brand, the number of exposures made absolutely no difference. In contrast, those students asked about their positive feelings towards the brand saw those feelings increase in a linear fashion based on the number of exposures. In fact, the authors noted that the positive vibes still appeared to be going up after 20 exposures, leading them to wonder where this effect might start leveling off.

Although in focus groups and surveys individuals will almost always say ads don’t affect them, that is just not the case. And as this study highlights that can be cause they’re not even aware of the influence ads actually have on them.