Effective marketing strategies aim to provide consumers with product information in an efficient way by highlighting its existence and increasing its awareness. Companies are therefore increasingly adopting the use of email as a means to achieve this, with varying degrees of success. This method has become a fast and efficient way for high volume marketing distribution, but it does have its drawbacks.

Consumers receive many marketing emails on a daily basis, and consequently, businesses are in continuous competition to stand out in an overcrowded inbox. Success in conversion-to-purchase is therefore largely based on how consumers receive and respond to the emails they are sent. Cognitive and behavioural factors such as memory/recognition and social trends also play a part in determining how successfully these emails are received by consumers. Such aspects can be determined by measuring how individuals view these types of stimuli, as well as indicating the shifting levels of attention in specific key areas.

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With a background in design, later followed by psychology, my decision to explore advertising surfaced with the desire for creativity and a keen interest in human behaviour. So after hours of people watching and doodling I thought I’d study the subject in more depth, and went back to Uni to do a psychology of advertising MSc.

Psychology of advertising explores the many aspects associated with how ads are designed and executed, in order to effectively influence consumer buying behaviour. This might include various cognitive functions such as attention, perception and memory, as well as cultural and behavioural factors that drive our decision-making processes.

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This year is the 25^th anniversary of a very significant event for me, an event that has led directly to me being here today.

In 1986, as a young direct marketer working for home shopping giant GUS, I was lucky enough to attend the Montreux Symposium, on the Lake Geneva shoreline (as Deep Purple put it).  At the time, the week-long Symposium was the biggest event in Europe for the direct marketing industry, and attracted some major speakers.  But for me, the single most significant session, one that profoundly affected my approach to direct marketing, was a ground-breaking live demonstration and seminar by Professor Siegfried Vogele, founder of the Institute of Direct Marketing in Munich that is now owned by Deutsche Post.

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The use of eye tracking in the research environment is growing significantly as a result of major advances in the sophistication, power and ease of use of the technology, according to Tommy Strandvall, the Global Training Manager for Tobii Technology at the international eye tracking conference held in London on the 9^th and 10^th of June.  Certainly, there was a real buzz about the conference on the day that my colleague Rosemary and I attended as speakers to deliver a session on findings from a major email eye tracking study that Red C is undertaking in 2011.

In fact, Tommy set a very high bar with his own presentation at the opening of the second day of the conference, with some remarkable live demonstrations of beta technologies, including a much-anticipated Tobii set-up to eye track mobile devices such as smartphones and iPads.  We enjoyed a live demonstration of Tobii Glasses, a lightweight eye tracker capturing data on a device not much bigger than a smartphone.

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About a month ago a massive shiny black monitor and loads of kit mysteriously appeared in our meeting room. None of us in Creative had a clue what it was. Speculation was rife. Were the top brass at Red C  about to start a programme of ‘Clockwork Orange’ style behaviour conditioning? Perhaps. We then noticed that members of the public were arriving on a regular basis and being ushered into the room, but before anyone could take a peek the door was promptly shut.
Curiouser and curiouser.
The machine remained a mystery… until my turn came.

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When it comes to Eye Tracking, there isn’t much that we don’t know. Which is why Marketing Week approached Red C’s Client Services Director, Rosemary Walton, to help out on an article about this fascinating subject. here’s what Rosemary had to say on the subject:

For Rosemary Walton, Client Services Director at agency Red C Marketing, fast eye tracking means clients can make changes to campaigns in real-time. In a world where people Twitter their thoughts to the world, brands expect to be able to find out insights immediately and communicate them back to base. Real-time analysis is vital.

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