Tool Box
Issue No. 17 - June/July 2004
Size - in Advertisements - matters
Honest advice on print advertising
by Dr David Corkindale
In an advertisement in a magazine how big should the picture of your product be? If you have lots of text describing its benefits does this turn people away? How big should your logo or branding device be? Some helpful research has just been published in the most prestigious Journal that addresses these issues and gives us some surprising advice (1). The findings would also be relevant to the design of brochures and leaflets – anything that you want to attract people to pay attention to and read.
Time spent on advertisements
With print advertising a reader’s attention is mainly reflected in the number of seconds they spend on an advertisement. It will horrify many to learn that this has been studied widely and the brief conclusion is that a reader devotes around two seconds on average. A double spread advert gets 2.8 seconds, while a half page or less gets 0.6 seconds. Size matters but most ads get scant attention.
Marketing efforts decline
Maybe an explanation is that in today’s marketing world, to reach our target consumers effectively and communicate with them using print media we need to cut through the competing advertisements and editorial material. Most magazines and newspapers typically contain at least fifty percent advertisements. Failure to capture the attention of our target audience – and retain it – is going to reduce the effective reach and push up our actual cost-per-thousand; we will be wasting money. Some marketing commentators say that the power of marketing is declining because it is increasingly difficult to get people’s attention; there is too much ‘clutter’ in the media and our advertisements just don’t get noticed, if we are not careful. The attention paid to the same size advertisements in newspapers has dropped by some 20% some studies find. What can we do about this?
Size, Colour or editorial?
It is generally believed that in print advertising size matters: lar...
