 When
a large retailer like Safeway or Walgreens puts a circular
in your Sunday paper or mailbox, its goal is to increase
overall store traffic and sales and enhance their store’s
image. These stand-alone circulars are known as feature
advertisements, a form of cooperative advertising between
retailers and manufacturers. Manufacturers pay retailers to
feature their products, while retailers coordinate ad
placement and combine the manufacturer’s products with their
own private labels and unbranded products. Feature ads often
appear in the U.S. as stand-alone mailings or as supplements
in the local Sunday newspaper.
Manufacturers and retailers invest significantly in
feature ads—about $3 billion in the U.S. in 2003 —so
maximizing their effectiveness is an important goal for
marketers. Michel Wedel, PepsiCo Professor of Consumer
Science, and Jie Zhang, assistant professor of marketing,
examine the way that different design characteristics affect
consumer attention to feature ads in a recent paper,
“Optimal Feature Advertising Design under Competitive
Clutter.” The study uses a large-scale dataset of attention
to over 1,100 feature ads, provided by Verify International,
a research company in the Netherlands. Consumer attention to
the ads was monitored with eye-tracking technology.
 Because
multiple ads appear in the same space, all competing for
viewer attention, feature ads are particularly prone to the
negative effects of visual clutter. This paper is the first
to quantify—and thus model the effects of—such competitive
clutter on feature ads. The authors constructed a model to
examine the surface size effects of five design
elements—brand, text, pictorial, price, and promotion—and
calculated how to maximize the effectiveness of the entire
ad display.
One of the problems faced by designers of feature ads is
the competing demands of retailers and manufacturers.
Manufacturers want the ad for their own product to be most
prominent on the page, but retailers have to balance
attention to the products of each manufacturer as well as
their own unbranded or private label products. Maximizing
the total attention to the ad display meets the needs of
both retailers and manufacturers, because it leads to higher
total attention to all individual ads on the page.
“The ad display should be segmented more effectively,”
says Wedel. “You want people to find the ad more quickly and
look at it longer.”
The pictorial element is almost always too large relative
to the other elements of the ad. Because pictorial has a big
impact, it does not need to take much space to be effective.
Text should also be given less space in an ad, but for the
opposite reason. Wedel and Zhang found that text has little
effect in attracting consumer attention, so there is no
point in wasting valuable ad space on it. Reducing the
relative size of the pictorial and text elements frees up
space in the ad for the elements that need to be larger,
like brand, price and discount information.
Wedel and Zhang’s recommendations can be implemented
without requiring manufacturers and retailers to spend
additional money. They derived the optimal designs with the
ad sizes unchanged, so the placement cost of each ad is the
same. “Our recommendations can be implemented at no
additional costs, so retailers and manufacturers get the
benefits without having to pay a penny more,” Zhang says.
Then there is the multi-billion dollar question: do more
eyeballs on the page really translate to higher sales in the
store? Wedel and Zhang are exploring this question for a
future paper. For more information about this research,
contact
mwedel@rhsmith.umd.edu or
jiejie@rhsmith.umd.edu. |
