Eye tracking analysis of consumer's attention to the product message of web advertisements and TV commercials

To examine the hypothesis that subjects who assign importance to the product selection criteria included in a commercial's message pay more attention to the message than do subjects who do not assign importance, an eye-tracking experiment was conducted. Commercials and websites with “reducing body fat,” “low in calories,” and “beneficial for dieting” messages were shown to 81 college students and eye-tracking data were collected. The results of the statistical analysis supported the research hypothesis. The tendency to pay attention to the messages that matched subjects' product selection criteria was more prominent in the case of websites.