In December 2009, Heath published, along with Angus Nairn and Paul Bottomly, a paper titled "How Effective is Creativity? Emotive Content in TV Advertising Does Not Increase Attention" in the Jounal of Advertising Research.
Its starting point is that, because attention is a difficult thing to gauge, marketers are often over-liberal in the way they use the term attention. He quotes a paper which use the word "attention", while what they were actually measuring was recall.
Fixations
So, how does Heath recommend we measure attention? Through measuring tiny, involuntary eye movements . He says "The use of fixations-per-second (FPS) as a measure of visual attention levels is well established in medical and social research."
So, what evidence does he provide that these fixations are a reliable measure of attention? "Wedel and Pieters, developing a comprehensive model connecting eye fixations with memory for advertisements, confirm that “the number of fixations, not their duration, is related to the amount of information a consumer extracts from an ad” (2000, p. 297)
Suberb. So, to be clear, he is critical of approaches which use ad recall as a surrogate for attention. And instead recommends measuring these fixations. Because they relate to ad recall. Really, you couldn't make this stuff up.
So, is the use of fixations 'well established' as a measure of attention?
Well, no. For example, there is a "comment" in Psychological Science in 2007 by Horowitz, Fine, Fencsik, Yurgenson and Wolfe from the Visual Attention Laboratory, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Cambridge, MA. The title says it all; "Fixational eye movements are not an index of covert attention."
Let's be clear; I know next to nothing about fixations. But what is clear is that rather than being "well established" there is real disagreement about this topic.Why does Heath not reflect this? Was it a willful omission? Or is he even less kowledgable about fixations than I am? My feeling is it is the latter; we've seen what happened in previous posts when he pretended to be a market researcher. Why should he be any more successful when trying to be a neuroscientist?
Movement
Then there is the whole issue of movement; there will be movement in the ads. Even if there was agreement about the use of fixations to measure attention, could this be done when the eye was following moving and changing images?
I don't know. I'm not an expert. But I asked one. I asked one who does feel that these very small eye movements carry some information about attention. His view was that visual features of the stimuli on the screen would affect the results, "so fixational eye movements do not give you pure measure of covert attention" and that somehow the visual features would need to be filtered out. It is a pity Heath did not talk to him before he set out on his work, because there is no indication that Heath attempted to filter out the effects of the visual features.
The Equipment
Finally, there is the question of how Heath measured these fixations. He is clear about this in his paper. He says he used "a discreet lightweight head-mounted eye-tracking camera that allows participants to sit at whatever distance they like from the TV screen and to freely move their head and body if they wish. "
Well, then Heath probably missed a paper in the Journal of Vision in 2008 called "The significance of microsaccades for vision and oculomotor control" by Han Collewijn and Eileen Kowler from the Department of Neuroscience, Erasmus University Medical Center, Rotterdam, which discussed how there is a difference in using systems where the head is fixed, and systems, such as Heath's, where the head is free to move: " One of the notable consequences of freeing the head was that the microsaccade, the hallmark of steady fixation performance, appeared suddenly to be irrelevant. Although some microsaccades still occurred during fixation with the head free, saccades of any size were infrequent during active oscillations of the head."
So, then, in summary, what Heath used, was a measurement system inapproaprate to measuring fixations, which in themselves are a poor measure of attention to TV ads.
Why on earth did Heath think that he, with his background in planning, was able to read a few papers and consider himself competent in this highly specialised field? What would Heath say if Han Collewijn and Eileen Kowler from the Department of Neuroscience at Erasmus University Medical Centre published a paper expressing a new model for ad planners, without having consulted any experienced ad planners?
Maybe he was reliant on the skills of his fellow writers; but, looking at their profiles, Paul Bottomly lists his interests as focusing on new product forecasting and decision making, while Agnes Nairn specialises in issues relating to marketing and chilldren. None of them claims any knowledge of measuring microsaccades.
Would it be rude of me to say "it shows"?
I'm left with the image of Heath completely out of his depth, but somehow ashamed to call for the help of a lifeguard.
His lack of comfort is revealed in the title of his paper; he limits himself to claiming that creativity does not increase attention. While his actual results show something far stranger: "Ads higher in emotive content received about 20 percent less attention than ads lower in emotive content" In other words, creativity in advertising decreases attention. How does he explain the counter-intuitive results he was seeing? I don't know if this next sentence came to him in a dreamy state in the middle of the night, or in desperation at the last minute before submitting the paper. But the only way he could explain his results was by suggesting that “ads that lack any emotive content will probably be perceived by the brain to be trying to communicate some sort of rational message, and relatively more attention will be deployed.”
Read it again slowly. I leave it to you whether you cry or laugh.