Who won the Mail? #2

Have you ever wondered which ads placed in the national newspapers are the most effective at engaging readers? In a new weekly feature on Newsline, we’ve partnered with Lumen Research to find out.

What’s better than winning an Oscar for Best Picture? Being the most effective ad in the Daily Mail, surely?

Yes – 12 Years A Slave has not only managed to walk away with a shiny Academy Award for its harrowing real-life account of American slavery, but has won the most effective ad spot in the print version of the Daily Mail.

In a new feature looking at which ads placed in the national newspapers are the most effective at engaging readers, this week Newsline can reveal that the cinema advertisement for 12 Years A Slave – with its use of powerful imagery and high-contrast colours – came out on top with an average dwell-time of 2.1 seconds per reader.

Every Friday, the Lumen team asks 100 people to read one of the national newspapers, this week investigating the Daily Mail, which reaches over 1.7 million readers every day in print.

The results – which are determined using eye-tracking technology that measures how long somebody looks at an ad, where the eyes go to first, and which parts are most popular – also show that 79% of readers looked at the ad.

Explaining the success, Mike Follett, founder of Lumen, said: “A single powerful image teamed with simple copy and universally recognised symbols get and guide attention.”

What was unusual, Follett said, was that people’s attention went to the text before the image. He said that this was a likely result of the timeliness of the ad – just after the announcement of the film’s success at the Oscars.

The second most popular ad was from Asda with an average dwell-time of 1.8 seconds, while M&S took the third spot with an average dwell-time of 1.1 seconds, despite having the highest salience (84%).