Eye fixation on advertisements and memory for brands: a model and findings

The number of brands in the marketplace has vastly in-creased in the 1980s and 1990s, and the amount of moneyspent on advertising has run parallel. Print advertising is amajor communication instrument for advertisers, but printmedia have become cluttered with advertisements forbrands. Therefore, it has become difficult to attract and keepconsumers’ attention. Advertisements that fail to gain andretain consumers’ attention cannot be effective, but attentionis not sufficient: Advertising needs to leave durable traces ofbrands in memory. Eye movements are eminent indicatorsof visual attention. However, what is currently missing ineye movementresearch is a serious accountof the processingthat takes place to store information in long-term memory.We attempt to provide such an account through the devel-opmentof a formal model. We model the process by whicheye fixations on print advertisements lead to memory for theadvertised brands, using a hierarchical Bayesian model, but,rather than postulating such a model as a mere data-analysistool, we derive it from substantive theory on attention andmemory. The model is calibrated to eye-movement data thatare collected during exposure of subjects to ads in magazines,and subsequent recognition of the brand in a perceptualmemory task. During exposure to the ads we record the fre-quencies of fixations on three ad elements; brand, pictorialand text and, during the memory task, the accuracy and la-tency of memory. Thus, the available data for each subjectconsist of the frequency of fixations on the ad elements andthe accuracy and the latency of memory. The model that wedevelop is grounded in attention and memory theory anddescribes information extraction and accumulation duringad exposure and their effect on the accuracy and latency ofbrand memory. In formulating it, we assume that subjectshave different eye-fixation rates for the different ad elements,because of which a negative binomial model of fixation fre-quency arises, and we specify the influence of the size of thead elements. It is assumed that the number of fixations, nottheir duration, is related to the amount of information a con-sumer extracts from an ad. The information chunks extractedat each fixation are assumed to be random, varying acrossads and consumers, and are estimated from the observeddata. The accumulation of information across multiple fixa-tions to the ad elements in long-term memory is assumed tobe additive. The total amount of accumulated informationthat is not directly observed but estimated using our modelinfluences both the accuracy and latency of subsequent brandmemory. Accurate memory is assumed to occur when theaccumulated information exceeds a threshold that varies ran-domly across ads and consumers in a binary probit-type ofmodel component. The effect of two media-planning vari-ables, the ad’s serial position in a magazine and the ad’s lo-cation on the double page, on the brand memory thresholdare specified. We formulate hypotheses on the effects of adelement surface, serial position, and location.The model is applied in a study involving a sample of 88consumers who were exposed to 65 print ads appearing intheir natural context in two magazines. The frequency of eyefixations was recorded for each consumer and advertisementwith infrared eye-tracking methodology. In a subsequent in-direct memory task, consumers identified the brands frompixelated images of the ads. Across the two magazines, fix-ations to the pictorial and the brand systematically promoteaccurate brand memory, but text fixations do not. Brand sur-face has a particularly prominent effect. The more informa-tion is extracted from an ad during fixations, the shorter thelatency of brand memory is. We find a systematic recencyeffect: When subjects are exposed to an ad later, they tend toidentify it better. In addition, there is a small primacy effect.The effect of the ad’s location on the right or left of the pagedepends on the advertising context. We show how the modelsupports advertising planning and testing and offer recom-mendations for further research on the effectiveness of brandcommunication. In future research the model may be ex-tended to accommodate the effects of repeated exposure toads, to further detail the representation of strength and as-sociation of memory, and to include the effects of creativetactics and media planning variables beyond the ones weincluded in the present study.(Brand Advertising; Visual Attention; Brand Memory; Hierarchi-cal Bayes