The art of eye-ball grabbing..!!

Challenging the assumption that television ads with lots of
emotional content encourage viewers to look at them more closely, a
new study has claimed that such commercials make people more
susceptible to sales messages.

In fact, consumers are more likely to scrutinise fact-based adverts so
they can "counter-argue" what they are being told, said the study by
the University of Bath.

It is the likeable, entertainment-based ads that bring our guard down,
making us more relaxed and suggestible to the pitch, researchers
discovered.

That has "serious implications" for certain types of commercials,
particularly those aimed at children and those that may harm our
health, said Dr Robert Heath, who led the study, The Telegraph
reported.

"There has been a lot of research which shows that creative TV ads are
more effective than those which simply deliver information, and it has
always been assumed that it is because viewers pay more attention to
them", he said.

"But in a relaxed situation like TV watching, attention tends to be
used mainly as a defence mechanism. If an ad bombards us with new
information, our natural response is to pay attention so we can
counter-argue what it is telling us."

For their study, the team used an eye-tracking device to measure the
real-time attention paid to a range of adverts with different levels
of emotional content.

The adverts were "embedded" in an episode of the sitcom Frasier and
participants were unaware that advertising was the subject of the
research.

The findings, published in the Journal of Advertising Research, showed
that viewers paid less attention to likeable, creative adverts and
more attention to factual information-giving adverts, even when they
did not like them.

Dr Heath said, "On the other hand, if we feel we like and enjoy an ad,
we tend to be more trustful of it and therefore we don't feel we need
to pay too much attention to it".

"The sting in the tail is that by paying less attention, we are less
able to counter-argue what the ad is communicating. In effect we let
our guard down and leave ourselves more open to the advertiser's
message".