Who won the Mail? #3

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.

Not content with winning the Champions League rights from Sky and ITV in a deal that cost almost a billion pounds (and Sky 10% of its shares), BT has only gone and won the most effective ad in this week’s Who won the 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 British telecoms giant managed to engage 95% of the Daily Mail’s readers for an average dwell-time of 3.3 seconds with an ad for BT broadband.

Though not quite as impressive as the 1.4 terabits a second broadband speed it managed to pass at the beginning of the year, BT’s use of visual hierarchy, simple price-led offers and high contrast design meant that the ad managed to pip runner-up O2 to the post, which appeared in the same issue of the newspaper with a campaign for Samsung.

So how exactly can we tell which ads are most engaging? 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 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 (cool, huh?), with colour and gradient playing a big part in BT’s success.

Mike Follett, founder of Lumen, said that using gradient colouring allows for both light and dark text to be used and creates contrast, and that using three main offers within the ad is a small enough number not to be off-putting to the reader.

What was surprising, however, was how well-read the small print was – something that is “rarely read this thoroughly”, Follett said.