Branding Effectiveness: Sports Illustrated & FootAction

If your goal is branding, you'd better make sure they see the brand!

A full write-up of this example (which is initially a little heavy on the Eyetools self-promotion since this was a corporate piece), follows...

Eyetools is uniquely suited to efficiently assess the probability if an advertisement’s design will successfully enhance branding by measuring what people actually look at in an advertisement. Here we compare two examples to measure the logo’s ability to impact the viewer and thereby lift the brand.

An example: Which Branding is Better?

If you look at these two examples from print advertising, we can make a dramatic comparison between their respective effectiveness. They were shown to the same group of people. They are both sports related. Their creative objectives are similar. They both seek to capture action and energy in their imagery. And yet, their performance is dramatically different.

Good Branding

In the hockey example, the viewers glance at the player to left, and then the group collectively glances to the Sports Illustrated logo on the goalie’s right leg with sufficient concentration to confirm that the majority of the group saw the logo and saw it as one of the initial elements to draw the group’s attention. If an advertisement can grab only a second or two of a person’s attention as it flies by on a bill board or is flipped past in a magazine, ensuring that the viewer notices the name or logo of the advertiser is a basic requirement of success for that ad. To top it off, the complete subtlety of the placement of the Sports Illustrated logo is sublime. By all accounts, this ad demonstrates superb ability to lift the brand of Sports Illustrated.

Bad Branding

By contrast, the ad on the bottom is not so successful. While similarly inspired, the ad below fails to direct visual traffic as successfully at the Sports Illustrated ad. First, the gaze of the group is drawn into the central image. By splitting the image into quadrants with an overlaid Zone of Interest on the hotspot in the center, we can see that the group predominantly glances around the image (1-4), finally settling on the region highlighted by the hotspot (5). Only then does the group chance a glance in the direction of the logo, but even then, fails to look directly on the logo (6), an as a result the maximum exposure they get to the brand is "FOOT". Not only are the concentrations of viewing lower than on the Sports Illustrated ad, but this company — FOOTACTION — does not have a logo that stands out in one’s peripheral vision, as would an Intel or a Pepsi logo.

To add insult to injury, of those of the group who glance from logo over to the tag line that runs up the left side of the image, only one person actually attempts to read the message. The rest of those who look to that image give the line one or two glances then quit — not enough to read a sentence running vertically as this one is.

-Colin Johnson