Abstract: Many enterprises regard banner advertising as a powerful means of network promotion, but the phenomenon of “Banner Blindness” is a network phenomenon that has troubled marketers for a long time. Creative advertising is considered to be a powerful tool to improve the effect of advertising communication, but few literature explores the mechanism of creative advertising on consumer attention in the network environment. This paper focuses on the impact of advertising creativity on the attention effect of online banner advertising, and tries to solve two problems through three groups of eye tracking experiments: first, whether advertising creativity itself can reduce the phenomenon of consumers’ banner blindness; second, how to use creative advertising to maximize the alleviation of the phenomenon of banner blindness and enhance consumers' attention. This study found that: (1) in the Internet context, creative advertising itself can not directly lead to better attention effect; in the browsing task context, creative advertising can bring better attention effect; in the search task, whether advertising has creativity or not has no significant difference in the attention effect of consumers; (2) in the search task context, the impact of advertising creativity on consumer attention. Path is regulated by visual saliency and content consistency of banner advertisements. Higher visual saliency and content consistency can make creative advertisements play a better role and alleviate the phenomenon of banner blindness. This conclusion reveals the mechanism of creative web banner advertising attracting consumers’ attention, which has practical significance for guiding enterprises to carry out online advertising marketing, and also enriches the existing research results of creative advertising and online marketing.

Key words: advertising creative, banner blindness, attention effect, visual salience, content consistency