South Africa's first eye tracking research company is launching ADGist™. ADGist™ measures the effectiveness of print and billboards in a single glance. It's a more realistic way to test ad effectiveness since most print and billboards get only a single glance when a person is flipping through a magazine or driving on the road. It is often thought that the money spent on the majority of ads that people don't pay much attention to is wasted, but is this really the case? ADGist™ assesses that.
People have opportunities to see several hundreds of print ads a day, according to some guesstimates. If people would look at all these ads for just a few seconds only, they would be exposed to commercial messages for several hours a day. Thus, the vast majority of ads can only be given a cursory glance at most, much shorter than a second.
Not only are exposures short for the vast majority of ads, but also only a coarse impression is obtained: exposures occur mostly in the periphery or in motion, in particular when quickly flipping through a magazine, or paying attention to the editorial rather than the advert. This begs the question of which meaning, if any, people can extract from the multitude of print ads that receive only a cursory glance, and whether companies' investments in these ads are completely wasted.
It turns out that in less than a second, people already know with certainty whether a visual image is an ad or editorial material and which product category is advertised: that is, they quickly grasp the gist of the ad. Such snapshot gist perception is based on coarse visual information in the ads, and differs widely between ads: some ads are more effective than others. The ADGist™ model assesses thecommunication effectiveness of ads in a single glance. The metric is based on a simple test that is easily implemented and quickly administered.
The higher the identification accuracy of an ad is, the better it conveys its gist under the short and coarse exposure conditions many ads experience in practice. Based on extensive pretests ads fall naturally into three classes from the test. Ads are a "Star" when their accuracy is uniformly high, a "Black Hole" when their accuracy is very low, and a "Moon" when their accuracy is in-between these two.
ADGist™ was developed by Professor Michel Wedel and Professor Rik Pieters. Michel Wedel is the Pepsico Professor of Consumer Science at the Robert H. Smith School of Business of the University of Maryland. Prof Rik Pieters is a professor at Tilburg University in the Netherlands.
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