Assessment of Advertising Effectiveness Through Audience’s Eye Movements

The evaluation of advertisement effectiveness during the advertisement design phase and pre-launch phase is critical for the advertisement’s success in the targeted market. This evaluation should predict advertisement’s final performance as accurately as possible. In today’s advertisement business, questionnaire-based evaluation methods, such as attitude and opinion rating are widely used. To obtain good survey results, high quality questionnaires and proper interviewing procedures have to be developed with the support of the competent execution and supervision. These activities are usually costly even though some of them can be conducted online. This paper proposes a novel method for assessing the advertisement effectiveness through the automated capturing and analyzing of audiences’ eye movements. This method is based on the assumption that some attributes of audiences’ eye movements are correlated to their visual attention defined in the context of advertisement effectiveness. To validate our research hypotheses, experiments were conducted. In the experiments, subjects were required to watch several advertisements in sequence and the subjects’ eye movement data were collected simultaneously. By analyzing the data patterns and comparing them with the effectiveness evaluation obtained from questionnaire-based method, we found that the proposed method produces similar evaluations to those resulted from the traditional attitude and opinion rating method.