Persuasive Advertising - J. Scott Armstrong [185]
Relevant pictures and headlines can stop readers when they are scanning. Once stopped, text attracts attention and, more importantly, maintains that attention.
Layout is especially important for the Internet. Websites can convey an enormous amount of information about a product and it is important to help users to navigate a site. The problem is complex because some people are new to a site while others are familiar. And some are familiar with a product while others are not. Thus, much attention has been devoted to layout issues under the term “usability.” Those who advertise on the Internet should avail themselves of some of the excellent books on usability such as Nielsen (2000) and Lynch and Horton (2009).
The following principles are especially important for high-involvement products with strong arguments.
9.6.1. Obey gravity
In 1870, the N.W. Ayer Agency of Philadelphia popularized the “picture window” layout. A picture fills the top three-fifths of the ad; the ad uses a bold headline; and the bottom two-fifths includes one or more columns with a logo near the base. It provides a logical way to use the gravity principle.
An analysis of print ads found that from 1930 through the 1950s, layouts were complex. Experts viewed this as a dark period in the history of advertising. In contrast, the Bernbach era of the 1960s brought back the picture window as part of a clean and organized look. Practices in the 1970s and 1980s moved back toward a cluttered look (Feasley and Stuart 1987).
For English and many other languages, the logical flow starts in the upper left corner, continues to the right, then moves downward, and begins again at the left. It seems sensible to start in the upper left and finish in the lower right. This flow obeys gravity. This is relevant for ads with long text.
It has long been known that readers of advertisements often do not follow the law of gravity. An early study found, for example, that a reader’s eye often starts in the lower left corner and moves to the upper right (Adams 1916). Over the years, eye-tracking studies have supported the view that readers’ eyes jump around while they view ads. Nevertheless, the principle of gravity aids readers in knowing where to look.
In some cases, advertisers might depart from gravity to make a point. The Chiropractic Association of South Africa did this effectively in an ad that read, “Does this hurt?”—the ad was turned on its side and the text ran bottom to top.
9.6.2. Avoid large pictures in informative ads
Pictures compete with text for space. Unless a picture provides the information more effectively than text, keep pictures small for informative ads.
To get an idea about current practice, I asked Rik Pieters to prepare an analysis of 1,363 full-page Dutch magazine ads. Pictures took up 58 percent of the space. More space was devoted to pictures for hedonic than for utilitarian products (62 percent versus 53 percent), and more space was provided for pictures for high-involvement than for low-involvement products (60 percent versus 55 percent).
One study coded 1,300 full-page print ads from major magazines in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Korea, and India. Pictures used 64 percent of the space for durable goods and 71 percent for non-durables. There was modest variation across countries: for example, with respect to durables, India devoted the least space to pictures (56 percent), while Korea devoted the most, 69 percent (Cutler and Javalgi 1992).
Evidence on the effects of picture size
Our analysis of quasi-experimental data suggests that illustrations in print ads are currently too large.
Informative print ads with smaller pictures had higher recall. Our WAPB analysis found 17 pairs of ads in which one ad had a smaller picture than the other ad. Recall for the ads with smaller pictures was 1.08 times greater than for the other ads.
Pieters and Wedel (2004) analyzed eye-tracking data for 1,363 full-page Dutch magazine print ads viewed by 3,600 subjects who read 65 consumer magazines. Ads with pictures drew more