An eye toward the details

OZ’s Tim Bradley sends a LinkedIn post from Nagessh Pannaswami, former VP at BBDO India, which included the image above.  These are two ads for Fiji water. Which was the stronger ad?

According to Pannaswami, the ad on the right increased purchase interest by 30 percent over the one on the left.

For aspirational products (fashion, beauty, lifestyle), he claims, research shows actors/models should look away from the camera because it helps the viewer imagine themselves in the scene.  For more practical products, direct eye contact is better because it conveys trust.

This reminds me of the thesis of a new book by neuroscientist Thomas Ramsøy, How to Make People Buy. The advertising community is focused on the importance of attention at the moment, thanks largely to the influence of researcher Karen Nelson-Field, who claims attention is essentially the be-all and end-all of advertising success.

Obviously, attention is a critical gatekeeper.  If people aren’t paying attention, your message won’t get through.  But they also have to be paying attention to the right thing. And they have to be thinking and feeling the things the advertiser wants them to think and feel.

And all of this is very sensitive to subtle changes.  Ramsøy notes that upward of 40 percent of ads his firm has tested feature a brand logo in the bottom right-hand corner – what he calls “the corner of death.”  Eye tracking suggests only 5 percent of people look at the bottom right-hand corner, so if you place your logo (or any other critical information) down there, people are likely to miss it.

This not only suggests the importance of careful communication testing – with specific attention toward those subtle, seemingly meaningless cues that can make all the difference.