Is something out of reach more attractive? The effectiveness of visual distance in computational advertising

With the development of mobile Internet technology, firms need to complete the entire process of consumer targeting, ad content generation, and ad display in a very short time window. Therefore, computational advertising, such as native ads on social media platforms, has become the mainstream of online advertising with its automation and personalization features. However, computational advertising faces some problems when using artificial intelligence technology to generate content. First, the images should have a significant enough impact on consumers and be easy to adjust to save computational power at the same time; second, the iteration of the computational advertising system relies on consumer behaviors or advertising effectiveness, and firms need to learn the relationship between ad design and consumer behaviors. Under the above two problems, this paper selects visual distance as the main variable, and images can be adjusted by cropping to save computational power. This paper incorporates image design and ad effectiveness metrics into the construal level theory framework, under which the effectiveness metrics can be quickly determined. Following previous studies, we use click-through rate (CTR) to represent the early stage of the sales funnel and a higher construal level and CVR (conversion rate) to represent the later stage of the sales funnel and a lower construal level. Therefore, visually distant images bring distant psychological distance or higher construal level, which can get higher CTR; visually proximate images bring near psychological distance or lower construal level, which can bring higher CVR. These findings suggest that firms can improve the efficiency of their advertising systems and gain more revenue by understanding consumer psychological states.