Assessing how a consumer process information is not easy and often observation is used as the base. Information processing starts with the consumers` exposure to some source of stimulus such as watching television, displays in shops, or seeing ads while reading a newspaper or a magazine.

Exposure alone means very little or nothing unless people pay attention to the stimulus. People are exposed to so many different stimuli everyday but have only a limited amount of capacity to process all the stimuli. Without attention no information processing will occur.

Attention can be viewed as the allocation of processing capacity to any information. It is a filtering mechanism that regulates amount of additional processing that any stimulus receives. Generally, the more the processing capacity that is devoted to any information, the greater will be the consumer’s awareness and comprehension.

Consumers allocate their attention on both a voluntary and an involuntary basis. Relevance of information to the consumer may encourage voluntary attention. Involuntary attention may occur when the consumer faces novel or unexpected but interesting stimuli.

Attention is selective, and for good reasons. People neither have cognitive capability not even the interest to pay attention to all the messages they are exposed to Advertising environment is so cluttered that consumers deliberately try to avoid ads.

Faced with this reality, it is not easy to create an ad that would catch the consumers` get processed and remembered, more so when so many competing brands from the same product categories advertise in mass media. The situation is particularly worse in case of television advertising. Research findings show that consumers process less information about a particular brand in the mist of such advertising clutter. With the remote control life has become a lot easier for TV viewers, but for marketers t has created difficulties, Television advertisers have to cope with “Zapping” and “zipping”.

Zapping is the act of switching cross TV channels with remote control, or completely switching off for some seconds and then starting it back. Zipping is the act of fast forwarding the ad part when playing pre recorded cassettes on a VCR /VCP.

There are certain ways in which zapping and zipping can b controlled. Research has shown that increase levels of clutters reduce the effectiveness of individual ads. There is an inverse relationship between clutters and to recall. Higher levels of clutter lower the levels of average ad recall. The consumers are likely to pay very little or no attention to the ad message because of too many competing ads.

Buying time on TV programs does not mean that the advertisers have purchased guaranteed exposure. It may also ensure an opportunity to communicate a message to a large number of audiences. There is increasing evidence that the size of viewing audience shrinks during a commercial break.

One way to combat zapping and zipping is to create ads that are inherently interesting for viewers so that they will prefer to watch them rather than zap or zip. Some advertisers think that ultimate way to check zipping is to produce creative advertising messages that will attract and hold audience attention. In reality all this is easier said than done because many consumers just do not want to watch commercials with the facility of increased number of available channels and of course the remote in their hands.