Main findings

There are no significant cultural differences in where and what people pay attention to when viewing ads.
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We found that attention to different areas, such as brand, product, and text, are highly similar across regions.
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There are minor regional differences in attention to specific types of content, but overall attention is highly comparable across the globe.

See all assets & heatmaps from the study here.

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Study scope

To date, we have a poor understanding of the regional differences in consumer responses to brand-related items such as ads, websites, and packaging. As Neurons embarks on predicting several aspects of consumer responses, it becomes critical to understand to what extent culture can affect the responses we measure and predict.

To assess this issue and potential bias in our own AI modeling work, Neurons conducted a study representing multiple regions and cultures in consumer attention to relevant consumer assets. We ran a global eye-tracking study to examine whether people across five different regions (i.e., Denmark, USA, Brazil, Guatemala, and Iran) show different attention behaviors while watching video ads, static ads, and general images.

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The purpose of the study

The aim of this study was to test whether different regions around the globe would show differences in consumer attention to different items. To do this, we tested visual attention to different consumer-related images in five countries.

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Methodology

A total number of 177 participants, 87 males and 90 females with an age range from 18 to 55 were exposed to different types of images namely website (e-commerce and branding), packaging, social media ads, static ads, and general images as well as video ads. While viewing the images and videos on a screen, participants’ eye movements and gaze were recorded using an eye tracker device (screen-based Tobii Pro Nano eye tracker).

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Study results

‍See attention heatmaps from each region here.

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What does this mean?

These results suggest that eye-tracking is very similar across the globe. This means that results in one region of the world will be quite similar to other regions. As Neurons is focused on creating predictive AI solutions, we will continue collecting data across all countries around the world to employ it for creating predictive AI solutions.

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Caveats & further actions

This study focused on attention in advertising and similar studies will be conducted for other types of consumer responses such as emotions, sentiments, and cognition.