of EDP center, and deputy head of the eighth group of technology town leaders and regiments in Yixing City, Jiangsu Province. He once worked as a visiting scholar in the United States for one year, worked as a temporary post in Yixing City, Jiangsu Province for one year, and served as the deputy head of the eighth group of science and Technology Town chiefs and regiments in Yixing City. In June 2018, he was selected as the "Southwest Jiao Tong University excellent entrepreneur innovation and mentor database", and the special expert committee of Southwest Jiao Tong University's "Internet plus" innovation and entrepreneurship competition. In July 2018, the "e-children" team under the guidance of our school won the second prize in the final of the 8th National College Students' e-commerce "innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship" challenge competition, creating the best result in history for our school and Sichuan competition area.

He has been engaged in research and teaching in the fields of neural marketing, network advertising and human resource management for a long time. Now he is in charge of one National Natural Science Fund oriented project and more than 10 provincial and ministerial level research projects. He has presided over and completed one National Natural Science Fund youth project, one central university basic undergraduate research business fund, the Ministry of education postdoctoral fund, and the Ministry of Education Humanities and Social Sciences youth project 1 project, presided over (completed) more than 50 other provincial and ministerial level projects, and more than 10 horizontal projects. As the principal researcher, he has undertaken one innovation team project "behavioral decision theory and its application in management" of the Ministry of education, and one national science and technology support plan of the 11th five year plan. He presided over the "Research on the influence of online advertising on consumers' cognitive neural mechanism and behavior" project and won the third prize of the 16th Sichuan social science outstanding achievement award in 2014.

Abstract(100-200 words):

Purpose – This study aims to explore whether creativity can overcome banner blindness in the viewing of web pages and demonstrate how visual saliency and banner-page congruity constitute the boundary conditions for creativity to improve memory for banner ads.

Design/methodology/approach – Three studies were conducted to understand the influence of advertising creativity and banner blindness on recognition of banner ads, which were assessed using questionnaires and bias adjustment. The roles of online user tasks (goal-directed vs free-viewing), visual saliency (high vs low) and banner-page congruity (congruent vs incongruent) were considered. Findings – The findings suggest that creativity alone is not sufficient to overcome the banner blindness phenomenon. Specifically, in goal-directed tasks, the effect of creativity on recognition of banner ads is dependent on banner ads’ visual saliency and banner-page congruity. Creative banners are high on visual saliency, and banner-page congruity yields higher recognition rates.

Practical implications – Creativity matters for attracting consumer attention. And in a web page context, where banner blindness prevails, the design of banners becomes even more important in this respect. Given the prominence of banners in online marketing, it is also necessary to tap the potential of creativity of banner ads.