Get it in a glance

The process was developed by Professor Michel Wedel who is the Pepsico Professor of Consumer Science at the Robert H. Smith School of Business of the University of Maryland and Prof Rik Pieters of the Tilburg University in the Netherlands.

Prompt Research Insights, reputedly the country's first eye-tracking research company, represents it in South Africa. According to Lindiwe Matlali, MD of Prompt Research Insights, it 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 only get that when a person is flipping through a magazine or driving on the road. It is often thought that money spent on the majority of ads that people don't pay much attention to is wasted, but is this really the case? This model assesses that.

It takes less than one second

“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 questions what meaning, if any, people can extract from the multitude of print ads and whether companies' investments in these ads is completely wasted.

“It turns out that in less than second, people already know with certainty whether a visual image is an ad or editorial material and which product category is advertised. Such snapshot perception is based on unprocessed visual information in the ads and differs widely between ads: some ads are more effective than others.

"The higher the identification accuracy of an ad is, the better it conveys its gist under the short and rough exposure conditions many ads experience in practice. Based on extensive pre-tests, 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.