Online Ad Creative: great cereal box, bad placement?

From: Greg Edwards <gstuff_at_eyetools.com>
Date: Mon 16 Jul 2001 12:17:12 -0500

Years ago, store marketers determined that how the
cereal box is designed is very important in making
sales. However, they also realized that the shelf
placement was another crucial factor in increasing
sales. My understanding is that a number of studies
were run where people were turned loose in a mock
supermarket aisle, and where they looked was measured
in different scenarios in order to objectively zero-in
on the optimum placement/presentation.

In the print news industry, Poynter did a land mark
study more than 11 years ago that tracked where people
looked as they read newspapers, to examine (among
other things) how various types of ads were perceived
based on a number of factors, including context. Some
of the widely held "rules of thumb" that they debunked
was the idea that "newspapers should put the lead
article in the top right corner because that's where
people look first," as well as "people tend to scan
pages one at a time from left to right, top to bottom."

It seems that the online advertising industry has not
yet gone through this same phase. There hasn't been a
corresponding examination of how page design (not just
page placement) either facilitates or discourages
perception of ads online. To date, most of the focus
has been on ad creatives and sizes. Banner ads are
placed at the top of the page because "people can't
miss it there," or the new large interactive ads are
placed right in the middle of the page because "people
can't miss it there," and yet this is just a
supposition, and the few studies that have been done
on banner blindness prove that people CAN ignore them.

Yet, "banner blindness" cannot be a hard and fast rule
because we also know, according to the Stanford Poynter
study (http://www.poynter.org/eyetrack2000/) published
a year ago, that, at least in news sites with frequent
news-readers, approximately 45% of all banner ads were
viewed. And some of our own studies have anecdotally
shown that the page design has a huge impact on whether
an ad (any ad) is viewed or not.

Shouldn't the online advertising industry use the same
metrics and methods to measure visual effectiveness as
has been done in the off-line world?

-Greg

Greg Edwards
Chief Technology Officer & Founder
Eyetools, Inc.
gedwards_at_eyetools.com
phone: (510) 440-1600
fax: (510) 405-2022



Received on Mon Jul 16 2001 - 12:17:12 CDT