Newspaper Advertising - The Creative Potential: How people read papers

Eyetrack is a form of mobile eye technology that owes its development
largely to the air-defence industry. It arrived at the start of the 90s
and uses a head-mounted camera to record eye movement over fractions of
a second. The equipment has evolved from a device that resembled a
deep-sea diver's helmet to a headset that does not impede view and
allows full head and body movement. The results are more qualitative
than quantitative and open to some degree of interpretation; they do,
however, offer the print creative a highly useful set of guiding
principles based on realistic user situations.

Two distinct headsets have been used in our research. The first measures
what could be termed "fixed" use, such as reading while seated at a
table.

The second uses a more lightweight, portable headset to record how
people read while on the move. Great care has been taken to disguise
motive; respondents are typically told that they will be monitored while
watching TV and are asked to wait in a room containing various
newspapers, where the real action takes place.

From a newspaper perspective, this approach offers one crucial
difference from the well-worn path of focus groups: it can jump the
hurdle of "claimed behaviour". Typically, newspaper research relies on
asking people to remember what they read, which introduces potentially
confounding variables such as peer pressure. Eyetrack simply records
what they read and how they read it.

The Times is the first newspaper in Britain to adopt this approach,
although the use of Eyetrack is growing in the UK. The Football
Association has bought into the technology for training purposes and the
Rugby Football Union, golfers and Olympic marksmen are all benefiting
from the insight Eyetrack can provide.

Such cutting-edge technology seems tailor-made to today's combative
newspaper industry. Although many of the findings are considered
unsurprising, others are a revelation.

What Eyetrack generally shows is that readers scan pages quickly to find
items of interest. But different people will read a newspaper in
different ways, some starting at the front, some at the back and others
heading straight for certain sections, such as the business pages. This
tells the designer that clear signposting sparks interest and aids
navigation.

Big is good. Large advertising sizes hold the reader's attention and are
harder to ignore. The eye is more frequently drawn to the top of the
page, confirming that the space at the top of the layout is
precious.

The position of branding elements follows a similar pattern; the higher
up the page, the more likely the eye is to process it. And it is at this
point that certain decisions come into play. Is brand establishment the
prime objective or can this space be used better? What exactly is the
message of the ad? And is a brand element likely to be recognised
quickly enough, given that a reader takes 0.1 seconds on average to
process a logo? If the purpose of the ad is to convey a special offer,
then placing that offer as close to the top of the layout canvas as
possible, with branding below, would perhaps be the most effective
approach.

Eyetrack gives us a very powerful set of pointers, but some types of
behaviour are much stronger than others. One highly consistent finding
is that readers' eyes follow the following sequence: image, largest
heading, content. We ignore this at our peril.

So which ads tested successfully? Different ads succeed, it seems to me,
for different reasons. The FlyBe work performed well because of its
punchy heading at the very top of the ad, reversed out of black and
placed in the news section - an environment that lacks such typographic
devices in the quality market. Suzuki took a half-page horizontal ad to
promote its Vitara model and used a single photograph across both pages
to strengthen each side visually and to increase the impact - the colour
helped, too.

Perhaps most interesting was the BT ad, which combined a coloured oval
and a cutout product shot in the top right-hand corner of the page. The
use of devices that are unusual in a particular editorial environment -
shapes with curved edges, cutouts - contributed to the ad's success,
providing enough novelty to attract the eyes of readers. People
processed the page's editorial content, briefly registering the top
corner of the ad as they turned the page, then flicking back to process
the ad content.

This raises the question of when an ad is actually processed. If there
is a turn-return reflex, as the BT instance suggests (which typically
occurs after editorial processing), the ad creative must consider the
elements that inhabit the space near the end of any editorial matter. In
this example, the dynamic combination of colour, shape and cutout image
complemented the editorial matter, sitting at the point on the page
where the eye has scanned body text and come to its endpoint, arousing
curiosity in the reader by providing a novel stimulus.

Where an ad sits in the context of the editorial is perhaps the area
where Eyetrack yields the most fascinating results. It has been a
long-held belief that ads on the right-hand page get noticed more and,
sure enough, the eyes of people reading from front to back tend to land
on the right-hand side of the spread. The eyes of those reading from the
back, however, are clearly seen to land on the left-hand side of the
spread. In broad terms, the implication is unambiguous - if you are
placing an ad in the sport section, left seems to be best.

Of course, creatives and designers, with their skills and wealth of
experience, will produce ad layouts that use various elements to convey
a message effectively. Eyetrack cannot do this, which is good news for
the creative job market. What it can do is provide solid cues based on
real behaviour.

As newspapers offer increased flexibility and choice, the battle for
readers' attention intensifies. Choose your research weapon - Sopwith
Camel or Stealth Bomber?

- Tomaso Capuano is the art director of new projects at The Times.