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Face-tracking proves power of destination shopping mall ads

December 07, 2010

At the beginning of 2010 Kinetic teamed up with Clear Channel Outdoor and conducted a face-tracking project to assess the impact of digital OOH advertising within shopping malls. The study, carried out in the mall of a medium-sized commuter town, provided invaluable insights into the mood of shoppers throughout each day of the week and provided feedback on the effectiveness of different types of creative.

In August, we repeated the project but this time enhanced every element of the methodology: most notably we conducted it in a larger mall, a retail and leisure destination that is among the top five in the country and has a weekly footfall of over 450,000 people.

A collection of youth-orientated ad messages were used in the research instead of the broad target audience of the ads in wave one. Lynx, H&M and Blackberry Messenger (BBM) were among the brands whose ads were under test. We again passively recorded gender, approximate age and mood or facial expression.

The size and range of outlets at Merry Hill, such as restaurants, bars and a cinema alongside the shops, was a crucial element in this study as it allowed us to assess how people’s mindsets differed while visiting a destination mall.

We found an engaged audience whose contacts increased throughout the day, as they were able to shop and eat at the mall later into the day, countering some of our observations in the smaller mall that was part of a town centre. There also appeared to be no significant difference in the level of engagement on weekdays and weekends at Merry Hill, while midweek shoppers in the earlier study appeared to have been more time-pressured, translating to a fall off in engagement duration.

Monday was the quietest day in the mall but the rest of the week, our ads were seen by an average of 22,000 people every day and over the weekend.

Crucially, given the nature of the ads under test, younger people were still engaged for the longest, proving that engagement duration is influenced by the demographic targets of the ads.

Here, the average contact time for 16-24s was 5.8 seconds, driven by ads for Warner Bros’ Cats and Dogs 3D, H&M and BlackBerry Messenger. In the previous study, when the artwork included ads for Surf, Lloyds TSB and Amex, the average contact time for this age group was just 2.4 seconds.

Perhaps not surprisingly shoppers were found to be generally happy in both mall environments but Merry Hill visitors appeared to be in a slightly more net positive state, driven by alertness. Younger groups appear to be most positive in this environment while females are the happiest gender with a feelgood factor score of over 36, while men clocked 29.5.

H&M was the best performing creative overall, scoring highly in both the happiness and the feelgood stakes (which charted net positive expression) reflecting a simple, colourful and escapist message. When each ad was monitored on its own we found that less emotive ads still drew impact: Lynx and T-Mobile, for example, drew a greater number of contacts per time shown.

The levels of engagement with advertisements that used animation or moving text or video were specifically monitored and our learnings for the second wave of research were largely the same as those from wave one.

Animated creative attracted more attention over static creatives, with the best example generating 24% more attention, showing that increasing degrees of animation improve a brand’s likelihood to be seen and for longer.

Furthermore, we found the use of scrolling transition had additional impact but, importantly, too little or too much animation actually loses attention and impact.

The Merry Hill Digital Malls study not only reinforced some of our earlier findings but also provided fresh insights into a different segment of mall user, and a different type of mall.  Consistently, the mall environment presents itself as an increasingly important platform, offering an invaluable opportunity to target audiences in a positive and engaged mindset.

This research method is not exclusive to the mall environment.  In 2011 we hope to take the face-tracking technology out into other markets and environments to further explore the most effective ways to reach people outside the home and on the move.