Eye fixations on advertisements and memory for brands: A model and findings

The number of brands in the marketplace has vastly increased in the 1980s a nd 1990s, and the amount of money spent on advertising has run parallel. Pr int advertising is a major communication instrument for advertisers, but pr int media have become cluttered with advertisements for brands. Therefore, it has become difficult to attract and keep consumers' attention. Advertise ments that fail to gain and retain consumers' attention cannot be effective , but attention is not sufficient: Advertising needs to leave durable trace s of brands in memory. Eye movements are eminent indicators of visual atten tion. However, what is currently missing in eye movement research is a seri ous account of the processing that takes place to store information in long -term memory. We attempt to provide such an account through the development of a formal model. We model the process by which eye fixations on print ad vertisements lead to memory for the advertised brands, using a hierarchical Bayesian model, but, rather than postulating such a model as a mere data-a nalysis tool, we derive it from substantive theory on attention and memory. The model is calibrated to eye-movement data that are collected during exp osure of subjects to ads in magazines, and subsequent recognition of the br and in a perceptual memory task. During exposure to the ads we record the f requencies of fixations on three ad elements; brand, pictorial and text and , during the memory task, the accuracy and latency of memory. Thus, the ava ilable data for each subject consist of the frequency of fixations on the a d elements and the accuracy and the latency of memory. The model that we de velop is grounded in attention and memory theory and describes information extraction and accumulation during ad exposure and their effect on the accu racy and latency of brand memory. In formulating it, we assume that subject s have different eye-fixation rates for the different ad elements, because of which a negative binomial model of fixation frequency arises, and we spe cify the influence of the size of the ad elements. It is assumed that the n umber of fixations, not their duration, is related to the amount of informa tion a consumer extracts from an ad. The information chunks extracted at ea ch fixation are assumed to be random, varying across ads and consumers, and are estimated from the observed data. The accumulation of information acro ss multiple fixations to the ad elements in long-term memory is assumed to be additive. The total amount of accumulated information that is not direct ly observed but estimated using our model influences both the accuracy and latency of subsequent brand memory. Accurate memory is assumed to occur whe n the accumulated information exceeds a threshold that Varies randomly acro ss ads and consumers in a binary probit-type of model component. The effect of two media-planning variables, the ad's serial position in a magazine an d the ad's location on the double page, on the brand memory threshold are s pecified. We formulate hypotheses on the effects of ad element surface, ser ial position, and location. The model is applied in a study involving a sample of 88 consumers who were exposed to 65 print ads appearing in their natural context in two magazine s. The frequency of eye fixations was recorded for each consumer and advert isement with infrared eye-tracking methodology. In a subsequent indirect me mory task, consumers identified the brands from pixelated images of the ads . Across the two magazines, fixations to the pictorial and the brand system atically promote accurate brand memory, but text fixations do not. Brand su rface has a particularly prominent effect. The more information is extracte d from an ad during fixations, the shorter the latency of brand memory is. We find a systematic recency effect: When subjects are exposed to an ad lat er, they tend to identify it better. In addition, there is a small primacy effect. The effect of the ad's location on the right or left of the page de pends on the advertising context. We show how the model supports advertisin g planning and testing and offer recommendations for further research on th e effectiveness of brand communication. In future research the model may be extended to accommodate the effects of repeated exposure to ads, to furthe r detail the representation of strength and association of memory, and to i nclude the effects of creative tactics and media planning variables beyond the ones we included in the present study.