Who won the Metro?

Have you ever wondered which ads placed in the national newspapers are the most effective at engaging readers? Newsline has partnered with Lumen Research to find out.

Their Twitter response rate and 3G service may arguably be amongst some of the slowest things on this planet, but at least EE has got a firm grip on its newspaper advertising as it wins this week’s Who Won the Metro?

Perhaps an indication of where the telecoms giant is putting its pennies, a full page ad on page 8 of the Metro caught 92% of readers’ attention – 16% more than expected.

While engagement levels were slightly lower than the norm (2 seconds compared with 2.3 seconds), recall for the brand was positive, with prompted recall at 39% and spontaneous recall at 24%.

Lumen founder Mike Follett said that brands should always aim to break the 2 second engagement level as a longer dwell time leads to better recall.

When comparing two EE ads, Lumen found that large, attractive images of new tech tend to grab respondent attention, with images of devices much more engaging than sim cards.

EE’s use of negative space has also been found to be a huge contributing factor to its advertising success.

“As design journalist Zorzini states, negative space is a design technique that plays a key role in determining the hierarchical significance of various sections of content on a particular page,” said Follett.

“Psychologist Maryanne Martin looked at the effect of scene sparsity’s effect on image processing. She found that images with lots of elements were more likely to be viewed globally (as a whole) whereas scenes with fewer elements are processed locally (looking at the individual elements).

“This could mean that by having fewer elements in your ad you are more likely to get people to engage with them.”