Peripheral vision is not something we normally think about when designing marketing media, but eye tracking has demonstrated how crucial it really is to their performance. The peripheral field of vision has a significant influence on eye movement and direction, and can be a decisive factor in encouraging readers to maintain engagement in marketing material. So now let’s take a closer look at how it all works and how we can capitalise on it to create more effective communications.

Our visual span broadly consists of three distinctive levels of perception. When you focus on an object you see it in every detail that your eye can distinguish (the fovea), but you will also notice everything in the background, only in gradually decreasing levels of detail towards the edges of your visual span (the parafovea and periphery).

The fovea is the smallest region and is typically used for activities that require high focus, such as reading. But this task would take forever if it weren’t for the parafovea (the area directly surrounding the fovea), which helps us to see the things in close proximity to what we’re already focusing on. It is this mechanism that allows us to read several words on a page rather than one at a time, drastically increasing our reading speed. It also helps us to identify objects in our environment to enhance our awareness, allowing us to focus on anything that catches our eye from the periphery. Read more…

So another year draws to an end, and now’s the time you start looking back at the things that made it memorable. Naturally, being a self-confessed advertising nerd, some of the best moments of this year came in the form of the brilliant advertising campaigns I saw. The ads that made me instantly think ‘awww, I wish I’d done that’. That happened quite a few times in 2012, but I managed to narrow those moments down to five. Take a look below and see if you agree with my selection!
Favourite TV advertising campaign of 2012

From John Lewis’ time travelling ‘Never Knowingly Undersold’ to Paddy Power’s ‘Chav Tranquiliser’, there were lots of TV commercials that grabbed my attention this year. But for me, none of them came close to DirecTV’s hilarious Death by Cable campaign. Why? Because they made loads of TV spots, and they all managed to be hilarious – and that’s some accomplishment.
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It’s YouTube marketing, but not as we know it. I’m not talking about those annoying ads at the start of videos, whose “You can skip to video in 5 seconds” button we can’t help but hammer-click until it finally takes us to what we really want to watch. Or even ad banners, video adverts or viral videos. This YouTube marketing is more a type of product placement, or even celebrity endorsement, where YouTubers (people who film themselves and upload videos to YouTube) recommend everything from mascara to coconut water to their impressionable followers.

Making you beautiful

The most popular genre of YouTube endorsement is beauty videos from self-styled “beauty gurus”. These beauty gurus, some of whom attract hundreds of thousands of followers, film and upload various types of help videos to their ‘vlog’ channels. These vlogs include a wide range of beauty and fashion topics including tips on makeup for different occasions, nail and hair tutorials to OOTD (outfit of the day) videos, product reviews and clothes hauls. Some even post vlogs and TAG (question and answer) videos, which allow the viewer to get even closer to the YouTuber. By getting an insight into a day in their personal life of these beauty gurus, a virtual relationship is fostered between vlogger and subscriber – creating the perfect conditions for successful product endorsement.

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Advertising agency self-promotion is a wily old beast. Being given carte blanche for a piece of new business dm may seem like a creatives’ dream, but anyone who’s ever had a crack at the perennial Christmas card brief knows that in order to give your agency standout, whatever you come up, no matter how pretty, needs to have some really solid thinking behind it.

And in our case, an injection of something a little bit weirder.

Of course, when I said ‘carte blanche’ I actually was referring to the new double-dip recession version which can be defined roughly as thus: ‘Do what you like, but don’t take the mick’. Fair enough. Blowing the cash for our Christmas party six months before the event wasn’t going to make us popular anyway, so the wooing of potential clients with a personalised Tom-Jones-a-gram was (sadly) out of the question.

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These days it’s quite common for us to see a Hollywood star pop up in our advert breaks. But back in the 70s and 80s (and even the 90s) adverts were what Hollywood A-Listers did before they became famous… so being seen in an advert in their home country was not really the done thing… or was something that you did once your career was on the slide.

Yet for an actor between films, the lure of the advertising cash was huge, so many of them headed off to Japan to appear in some quite bizarre adverts. Adverts that they assumed would never be seen by a wider audience… you’ve got to love YouTube haven’t you!

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We’re all big film fans here at Red C… as well as being advertising geeks. So the death of Tony Scott has really shocked us, as he not only made some of our favourite films, he also made some of our favourite adverts too.

Not many people realise that Tony Scott started his career making TV commercials. At first Tony had wanted to do documentaries, but his older brother Ridley persuaded him to work at RSA. Telling Tony (who was mad keen on cars) that he would have a Ferrari with in a year of working with him… and he did.

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There was a time when people used to do one thing at a time; watch television, make a phone call, use the internet. Now, thanks to the rise of the web and smart phones, the number of people watching TV while using the internet and/or a smart phone is increasingly a common occurrence. According to a recent report, 59% of UK mobile phone owners have a smart phone and 62% of these dual screen while watching TV.

I regularly find myself checking social media sites while watching TV, to see what other people’s thoughts are on the show. If I want to find out something about what I’ve seen on TV, I’ll often head for Wikipedia or Google. And, more recently, if I want to find out the name of a song I’ve heard whilst watching an ad, I’ll Shazam it.

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When we were asked to pitch for the Marisota Autumn-Winter 2012 DRTV Advert, there was a buzz of excitement around the agency. Not only was this an opportunity to win the recruitment activity for Marisota – a brand we helped create – it was a chance to make an ad that would break free from the traditional home shopping template, and take the brand in a more modern direction.

To sum up the brand in a sentence, Marisota is ‘a collection of contemporary clothes, underwear and footwear available in a choice of sizes, lengths and fit options that is designed for today’s modern woman.’ It was our job to come up with 4 concepts that expressed this proposition in 4 different ways. The concepts were then put before a research panel of existing customers and prospects. They helped select the winning concept, called Sketchpad.

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I still remember the shock now. I was leafing through a directory of TV commercial directors to use for my very first approved ad, and I noticed that many of the names I was looking at were big name Hollywood film directors. However, my excitement soon faded when it dawned on me that my miniscule budget would stop any chance of rubbing shoulders with Ridley Scott or turning my ad into a Spike Lee joint.

My dream of working with Hollywood’s finest still remains just that, a dream. But that doesn’t mean I’m still not fascinated by their work, especially when they take on the world of advertising. After all, for me ads are just short movies – with lots of product placement. They’re exciting, and never more so when the movie Gods get behind the camera. That’s why I thought it’d be fun to pay homage to some of my personal favourite TV commercials by film directors.

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“Utterly disgraceful…disgusting to the point of being nauseating…cheap and disrespectful propaganda!”

It’s fair to say that Daily Mail readers didn’t like it one bit: a 90 second commercial, commissioned by the Argentinian government, showing an Argentinian athlete, training for the Olympic games. No problem with that, you might say. But here’s the rub. This chap (Argentinian Hockey Captain, Fernando Zylberberg to be precise) wasn’t training down his local sports centre. Oh no. He was training in the Falkland Islands capital of Port Stanley, on a war memorial built to honour British servicemen who died in World War 1. Not only that, the ad concludes with the slogan, “to compete on English soil, we train on Argentinian soil.”

And there in lies the problem. The Falkland Islands, as everyone knows, are recognised as a self-governing British Overseas Territory, under British sovereignty (though the Argentinian’s dispute this). The ad was aired following months of political bickering between London and Buenos Aires over the issue. And it’s that slogan which got the normally level-headed and reasonably minded readers of the Daily Mail up in arms.

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