saccadic eye movement Tag

Is your advertising research improving the bottom line?

In today’s economy, if your research expenditures are not adding to your bottom line, you’re wasting money. Eye movement noting, brand recall and expressed purchase intent are tools from the 1960’s and 1970’s that are meant to protect research departments from catastrophic failure, not provide tactical approaches for how packaging, ads and video content can better connect and influence target audiences. These legacy approaches were never designed for today’s new world of mobile platforms, millions of pre-roll ads, a digital economy, mega-supermarkets, television commercial avoidance, and small, yet valuable, magazine audiences.

Here are a few facts we have uncovered as part of our brand communications research:
• While magazine audiences have shrunk, highly engaging print ads are working better than ever in this medium.
• A pre-roll ad with high engagement during the first 5 seconds can persuade over 400% better than one that doesn’t capture attention.
• Display advertising is not as dependent upon viewability as it is on engagement. Most “in your face” banner ads are being completely ignored.
• What does it take to get a shopper to stop and consider your product when shopping an Amazon, Walmart or Target shopping site? Hint: It’s not what you think. Rather it is the engagement with your product’s picture in the posting. The higher the engagement level, the more copy readership and consideration to purchase.
• Do TV ad GRPs make a difference in persuasion? Not as much as you might think. Some of the most repeated commercials on air quickly lose engagement and their zapping (or ignoring) skyrockets. The right balance of reach and engagement is critical.

Given these realities it’s high time for research technology to address today’s world of binge viewing, mobile advertising, streaming videos, e-commerce and mega shopping stores. At PTG we have moved well beyond eye movement noting, brand recall scores and expressed purchase intent to give our clients an objective measure of engagement that leads to increased purchase behavior.

PTG incorporates a non-invasive biometric indicator called Saccadic Eye Movement into our copy testing and package testing methodologies. In simple terms, saccadic eye movement reflects the cognitive processes the brain uses to capture visual information.

More specifically, in order for the brain to gain a visual picture of a stimulus, the eye must vibrate and provide constant streams of information to the center of the retina called the fovea. The more visual information the brain wants, the more actively the eye vibrates. These mini-movements are known as macro-saccades. In order for the brain to remember a specific visual, the eye fixates and stops moving for a fraction of a second. These macro-saccades and fixations reflect an objective level of respondent behavioral engagement that is uniquely recorded by PTG’s patented Saccadic Eye Movement Recorder.

Saccadic e-Motion, as we fondly refer to the technology, measures second-by-second visual engagement as well as element-by-element eye tracking and allows us to pinpoint specific areas where our clients can make small changes to their advertising that make a big impact in sales performance.

To learn more, feel free to reach me at lee.weinblatt@pretesting.com.

Product noting is important, but actual engagement is required to predict true success.

There are a variety of methodologies available in the marketplace that record eye movement and note when products have been seen on shelf. And, as a result, clients often come to PTG looking for us to assist them in measuring how successful their product is at being distinguished among the competition.

As part of these conversations, we explain to our clients that on average 7,000 packages are noted during a simple supermarket trip, yet only 17 items are actually purchased. Often, noting of a product is just required to find the desired product usually placed alongside it. What this means is capturing noting does offer some valuable information; however, evaluating noting in the absence of actual consumer engagement can lead to false results.

Here’s an example that we often share to illustrate our point. Our research has found that noting increases dramatically when a key brand like Kleenex is removed from the shelves. In the absence of additional data points around consumer behavior, this increase in noting would lead one to believe that there was sustained interest in other facial tissue brands; but the reality is, the uptick in noting was the result of consumers searching the shelf for the missing category leader.

When the same scenario was tested using PTG’s truShelf simulated store environment, our patented Saccadic Eye Movement Recorder measured actual consumer engagement and product interaction which provided a much more comprehensive understanding of respondent involvement. For example, we were able to report the degree to which respondents zoomed in on a product, examined a specific section on a shelf and read ingredients on a package – line by line. This level of information not only provides the tactics and recommendations needed for improvement on the shelf, and at the component level, but it also serves as the critical information needed to prove or disprove the noting data. In the example above, our simulated shopping methodology rightly concluded that something was amiss on the facial tissue shelf when noting was up but consumer engagement was nil.

Why is measuring Saccadic eye movement so important? Saccadic eye movement is a biometric indicator that objectively measures cognitive processing. In order for the brain to gain a visual picture of a stimulus, the eye must vibrate and provide constant streams of information to the center of the retina called the fovea. The more visual information the brain wants, the more actively the eye vibrates. These mini-movements are known as macro-saccades. In order for the brain to remember a specific visual, the eye fixates and stops moving for a fraction of a second. These macro-saccades and fixations reflect an empirical level of respondent behavioral engagement that is uniquely recorded by PTG’s patented Saccadic Eye Movement Recording system.

Interested in learning how measuring engagement with Saccadic eye movement is more effective than noting and more indicative of future sales success? Let’s talk. I can be reached at dan.morris@pretesting.com.