Effects of the Presence of Faces on Attention, Recognition, and Preference in Print Advertising

In an increasingly cluttered advertising environment, technological changes have determined an overabundance of visual stimuli (Nielsen, Shapiro and Mason 2010): as a consequence, marketers have become interested in finding new ways to augment the attention getting capacity of advertisements. Existing research has shown that people manage the information overload in selective ways (Alpers and Gerdes 2007): thus, allocation of attention can be triggered by the well-known process of orienting response, an involuntary reflexive reaction to a novel or significant stimulus due to a state of physiological arousal which is normally accompanied by the physical orientation toward the source of stimulation (e.g., Greenwald and Leavitt 1984). To shed light on this research topic in marketing field, the study investigates the effects of the presence of faces in print ads on consumer attention, recognition, and preference. Additionally, the study intends to assess if such effect are also valid for advertisements representing products evoking human-faces, in order to increase the current understanding of the pareidolia phenomenon in marketing. Results show that the presence of faces in print advertisements (as well as products resembling faces) makes them more effective in attracting attention, and that when exposure time is limited (0.5-3s), individuals tend to be more attracted by ads with faces. Furthermore, ads depicting faces or products resembling faces are better recognized than ads without faces, and they tend to be preferred when compared with ads that portrait the product alone. Therefore, as faces seem to have a significant advantage in terms of attention-getting capacity when they compete with other objects, marketers should not neglect the opportunity of including them in their advertisement campaigns. Moreover, since mean attention to advertisements with faces seems to be higher when exposure to it is particularly short, results may be especially useful for designing billboard or electronic ads, as these kinds of advertising is traditionally observed for a short time lapse. Although these results cannot allow to state that faces (or objects resembling faces) are processed faster than other categories of objects, it appears that consumers tend to be attracted by advertising with faces as in a sort of pre-attentive process, that is, a fast, parallel, and effortless processing which is not under the direct control of the subject (Atienza, Cantero and Escera 2001). Hence, it is plausible to suppose that orienting response mechanism could drive consumers to choose between different ads, thus affecting their willingness to buy a product.