Brand Building Takes Time AND Talent

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The lead story in this week’s Campaign about Pfizer looking for a retained European agency a for a well known pharmaceutical product reminded us of the award winning advert for Vitta Farma:

The Original Vitta Farma Ad

The Original Vitta Farma Ad

So we tested the advert in our omnibus in the context of Men’s Health magazine with a sample of thirty men and found that the advert elicited subconscious emotional responses of surprise with confusion, mild shock and in some cases disgust. These emotions were not resolved in the majority of readers because they did not know what the brand Vitta Farma does and they didn’t read the white out of pink text ‘Medicine for erectile dysfunction with special discount.’ As can be seen by the eye tracking heat map. Continue reading

The (Long Forgotten?) Art of Long Copy

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Some months ago I was discussing the demise of long copy advertisements on a train journey with Rory Sutherland: I asked him if thought the amount of time we spend online had shortened our attention spans and if this had led to the demise of long copy ads?

“Oh no my dear boy!”  Boomed the reply. “The decline began long before that, you see the problem stems from when the industry started to place more emphasis on art and less on the copy, this happened at least ten years before the internet came into its own.”

I was encouraged by Rory’s response and wanted to test if people would still engage with long copy adverts. As good fortune would have it I found a I copy of Good Housekeeping from the late 90’s whilst on holiday in France. Whilst flicking through it I found an interesting long copy ad from BT. I ‘borrowed’ the magazine and included the BT advert as part of a ThinkPrint Advertising Effectiveness omnibus study. Continue reading

Is Kate Moss Worth It £33,000 a Day ?

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Kate Moss reportedly makes £33,000 per day we wanted to research what additional attention she brings to an advert; we eye tracked several luxury perfume magazine advertisements and were surprised by the result: Supermodel Kate Moss did not attract any more attention than an ‘unknown’ model.

Coco Chanel

93% of readers viewed both the Chanel and the Armani Code advertisements. Continue reading

Cuing customers to look at your key messages

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This is an example we have used for several years and came out of some very early research we did with JCDecaux, but we have never put it into a blog, so I thought I’d revisit it here.

In the research, one of the questions we were exploring was how visual attention can be directed through elements of an advertisement. One such cuing element we investigated was the models visual attention. Most beauty and hair care advertisements follow a basic template of the model looking out engaging with the viewer and a pack shot sharing a significant amount of the ad real estate also. An example of this is the Sunsilk advertisement below, along with a heatmap of 200 people viewing it.

Note that there is very little attention on the pack shot and brand logo. In fact just 6% of the people looked at the pack!

What happens if the model is engaging with the product rather than the viewer? We photoshopped the ad and turned the models eye to the pack shot. See the results below:

This tiny change had a profound effect. 84% of the viewers now looked at the pack! This is 14 times more people looking at the pack. You can also see that there is overall greater engagement with the ad, including more attention to the brand logo at the bottom.

I‘m not suggesting that every ad should have the model looking at the product or key message, but using the model’s gaze can be a very effective way of guiding the viewers gaze and communicating key messages.

Hollywood & Eyetracking Reveals How To Sell More Magazines

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The magazine market is big business!

Size of the UK market:

· 2,600 magazines are sold every minute of every day in the UK

· People in the UK spend around £2bn on magazines each year

· 80% of women regularly read a consumer magazine

· Consumer magazine sales have increased by 4.3% over the past 5 years and the average UK adult now purchases almost 30 magazines every year

(Periodical Publishers Association 2008)

If we asked you what attracts you to a particular magazine on the shelf, you might say ‘the front cover’. If you did, you’d be in agreement with around 75 percent of magazine consumers. The cover of a magazine has enormous influence on most purchasers’ buying decision – all but the most loyal of readers. It can be seen as an ‘advertisement’ for the issue’s content and most women’s mags share a generic layout – a model surrounded by the article headlines.

It is estimated that 60 percent of newsstand purchases are unplanned, and reports indicate that time spent selecting a magazine ranges from forty seconds grazing the newsstand, down to five seconds considering an individual title.

With an impulse buy like this, marketers only have a few critical seconds to appeal to the consumer’s subconscious, to evoke an interest in the magazine and successfully make a sale. Therefore, it is important for marketers to understand what is going on in the consumer’s head when they look at a cover and make their purchasing decision.

How eye tracking can help

Eye tracking offers an objective approach to understanding consumer behaviour. Eye movements can reveal hidden cognitive processes which can help understand and predict purchasing decisions.

To investigate front cover preferences, we conducted an eye tracking experiment using 30 female participants. They were asked to select a magazine they would purchase from eight available. We were particularly interested in researching the effect of two models on the front cover, instead of one and if it would influence the purchaser’s decision. The front covers of ‘Eve’ and ‘Good Housekeeping’ were Photoshopped to remove Patsy and Susannah from the original covers.

Which do you think got the most attention? Which got least?

magazine-covers-not eyetracked

Original (two model) and Photoshopped (one model) covers of Good Housekeeping and Eve magazines.

Heat maps display an aggregation of many individual’s viewing experience. Above, you can see that fixations are generally concentrated around the faces of the models/celebrities. Engaged people often make long fixations, and this is also in line with previous research on non-verbal communication e.g. eye contact indicates interest, attention and involvement. Interestingly, the actual text on the covers is not looked at very much.

N.B - 96% of participants looked at the image of Davina alone compared to just 8% who looked at Patsy and Davina.

96% of participants looked at the image of Davina alone compared to just 8% who looked at Patsy and Davina.

We can see that the image of Davina alone received more attention than the image of both Patsy and Davina (Eve), as demonstrated by the dense area of red. There were also longer fixations on the image of Davina, suggesting higher engagement and cognitive activity taking place here. Perhaps because Patsy and Davina are not normally regarded as a pair, less interest is taken in them.

Trinny and Susannah received more attention that Trinny by herself, because they are normally regarded as a pair. Trinny and Susannah received the most attention of all of the ten magazine covers we tested.

Celebrity parings work better when people believe there is a relationship between the pair – this is a technique Hollywood has been using to great effect for years!

Thanks for reading: http://twitter.com/modestrobert