The influence of location-related factors on the perception of billboard advertising

Abstract

The impact that printed out-of-home advertisements have on the consumer’s perception is dependent on several location-related factors. For a long time, however, this influence was only indirectly gathered by measuring the relative performance of different locations of billboard advertising: Advertising agencies were traditionally only measuring consumer movement patterns and estimating “exposure opportunities”, but no real visual contacts. In this paper, the influence of the factors competition, distance, environmental complexity, occlusion and viewing angle, used with increasing frequency to improve those estimates on billboard perception, is analyzed using eye tracking technology. Two slightly different walks through a city environment are simulated, and changes in gaze behavior due to a variation of the aforementioned location-related factors are recorded and compared. The results confirm the impact of the environmental complexity and occlusion factors, whereas the influence of the other factors is lower or less conclusive. The results presented in this paper help to better understand how these factors affect human attention and allow for a more precise comparison of the relative importance of these location-related factors on the consumer’s perception. Furthermore, they might help to improve existing advertisement measurement systems.