The results of a recent study of by JCDecaux Airport and Eyetracker suggest that people don’t take in their surroundings (and the advertising within) in the manner we think they do.
As marketers, some of us might be tempted to think there’s a simple cause and effect at play when people encounter our ad messaging.
- The ad gets the customer’s attention.
- The customer pauses to watch.
- The customer absorbs the message.
- The customer moves on (hopefully with the goal of acting on the message).
Wishful thinking, it turns out.
This study — which had test subjects walk through an airport terminal wearing eyeglasses that monitored their field of vision and precise point of focus — actually demonstrates that people do not absorb the sights around them in any seemingly rational order. In fact, their eyes dart about somewhat haphazardly, flitting and resting for just fractions of a second on faces, moving people and objects and, yes, digital signage. This is called saccadic viewing.
Indeed, the Eyetracker study gives new ammo to those who have advocated for the ability of digital signage to capture the attention of people in indoor environments. The test subjects registered 1,985 unique screen views (a view was measured as 0.3 seconds). Divided by the 20 test subjects, that comes out to nearly 100 impacts per individual. Given that there were only 89 screens in the test environment, we can conclude that some subjects viewed the same screen more than once.
But for those of us who have been working with digital signage for some time (John Ryan, for instance, has 18 years of experience), none of this is surprising. We’ve known for some time that the medium works. The true art lies in how one goes about integrating digital signage into unique environments. That’s what makes the other finding in the Eyetracker study so interesting.
Perhaps you remember or have heard about “Burma Shave” signs? Burma Shave was a brand of shaving cream sold in the U.S. from the 1920s through the 1960s. The company had great success posting clever ad slogans along highways on signs that were meant to be read in sequence as drivers rode past them.
Similarly, one might think that digital messages could be staged sequentially, with a introductory message at the entrance of a store, a follow-up message partway along the shopper’s path, and another message (the call to action, perhaps) yet deeper in the store.
The Eyetracker study doesn’t shoot down the idea of sequencing, but suggests that the order of messages is not what you might think, at least not in an airport terminal. In what they term as the “Cascading Effect,” the study’s authors found that users viewed screens in the following order:
- Middle-distance screen
- Far-distance screen
- Near-distance screen
The Eyetracker report goes on to suggest ways that this Cascading Effect can be harnessed:
“By combining luminenscence and movement, such as moving the creative focus to mirror the way passengers view the screens, advertisers can increase the impact of their adverts.
Further augmentation can be obtained by putting more detailed messages in the first screen of the Cascade, and using flashes of animation to bring the focus of attention to them.” (pp. 8&9)
Airport photo: n0nick
Burma Shave photo: Ken Koehler
