Persuasive Advertising - J. Scott Armstrong [184]
In Wheildon’s (1995) experiments, readers complained of fatigue when reading bold text. Wheildon conducted his tests using Times Roman font, and found that his subjects’ comprehension was much better when he used a regular font rather than bold.
9.5.4. Select a typeface to enhance meaning or emotion
In addition to transmitting content, typeface also has connotations that can affect meanings and emotion. Thus, the selection of typeface might involve trade-offs between ease of reading and connotations.
For example, in a study of how users perceived 20 different typefaces on-screen, Times New Roman was rated first with respect to implying stability, maturity, and formality. It was rated second for conformity and practicality (Shaikh et al. 2006).
Consider the typeface also as a means to express product characteristics. For example, it could be used to emphasize that a product is heavy and sturdy (e.g., a truck), light and airy (e.g., summer clothing), short, or tall. Or it could be used to connote elegance, simplicity, professionalism, or youthfulness.
An example: In a General Motors ad regarding how motorists can fight fatigue, the final letters in the word “fatigue” were slumping over, and the picture showed the crumpled front end of a test car, and the crumpled words, “Safety doesn’t stop here.”
A typeface might take on connotations because of common usage in a particular context. Colored typeface might help express emotion or be relevant to a product, such as orange for Halloween and red for Valentine’s Day.
Fonts can also be used to connote images or historical periods. For example, you might use a typeface common to the early 1900s to advertise a beer made the old-fashioned way. Tourist ads for Napier, New Zealand use art deco typeface to emphasize its many art deco buildings.
Evidence on the effects of typefaces that support meanings
Our quasi-experimental study supported this principle:
Print ads that used typeface to convey product characteristics improved recall. Our WAPB analysis found 16 pairs of print ads in which one ad used typeface that expressed product characteristics while the second did not. For example a Korbel Champagne ad that used an elegant font for its headline Uncork the magic! had a recall score that was twice that of another Korbel ad that used an ordinary font. The recall of ads with meaningful typeface was 1.28 times better than for the other ads.
In a lab experiment, 18 subjects read the names of various animals as soon as possible after they were flashed onto the screen. The typeface was either consistent or inconsistent with the animal (e.g., a heavy or light typeface for “elephant”). Correct responses were faster when the typeface meaning was consistent with the animal (Lewis and Walker 1989).
We analyzed non-experimental data from WAPB. In comparison with the industry norms for each ad, the average persuasion score for the 170 ads that used meaningful typefaces was 8 percent higher than the comparable score for the 50 ads that used ordinary typefaces.
9.6. Layout
Layout refers to the space given to the key elements of an ad—the picture, headline, copy, and brand identifiers. It also relates to their placement within the ad, and to the use of white space.
The layout should grab attention and then hold it. This is often difficult. An eye-tracking study for newspapers, conducted in England, found that subjects spent an average of 0.62 seconds per print ad (Chisholm 1995). Using four versions of a full-page ad for shampoo, a Dutch eye-tracking study found that subjects spent 0.63 seconds scanning the typical full-page magazine ad, and the time was equally divided between the picture and the headline (Rosbergen, Pieters, and Wedel 1997). For retail ads that compete with other ads on the same page (that is, ads fighting clutter), subjects spent less time, about 0.2 seconds for Dutch ads. However, subjects who “selected” an ad spent about 0.4 seconds on their initial scan (Pieters, Wedel, and Zhang