Attention to Print Advertising: An Eye Tracking Study in the Context of Airline Advertisements

Due to the large number of commercial messages that consumers are exposed to on a near-constant basis, many print advertisements remain unnoticed by the intended target audience, leading to substantial reductions in advertising effectiveness (Ha 1996). Consequently, the development of approaches to improve consumer attention and to successfully cut through the clutter of competing advertising messages remains a constant challenge for marketing practitioners (Rumbo 2002). The importance of attention as the initial step to a positive consumer response is recognized by various models such as AIDA (attention-interest-desire-action); these models are built on the premise that only those elements of a message that receive sufficient attention from the audience will receive cognitive processing capacity, and that attention is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for subsequent stages in information processing and decision making. In the case of print advertisements, the allocation of cognitive processing capacity by the consumer requires a minimum amount of visual exposure time. As such, precise knowledge of that exposure time and of the exact elements that consumers may actually pay attention to is of significant importance for marketers if they wish to improve advertising effectiveness. In order to gain additional insights into how consumers process information from print advertisement, this study measures visual attention using eye tracking technology. The current paper presents selected findings from a larger eye tracking study conducted in the context of the airline industry, a sector subjected to constant and comprehensive cost-cutting demands that also – and especially – necessitate an improvement in their advertising efficiency and effectiveness.