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.

With the slow drag of tired feet, pale faces crammed side by side in an indistinguishable mass of grey, it wouldn’t be completely unreasonable to say that London’s morning commuters are a little bit like zombies; which is perhaps why they were pulled into the advertising underworld by this week’s winner of Who won the Metro?

With an advert for apocolyptic TV show The Walking Dead, Sky not only managed to secure first-place for ad-performance this week, but also became the best-performing ad ever recorded by Lumen.

100% of commuting lemmings engaged with the advert for an average of 14 seconds – 8.1 seconds longer than regular humans.

The eye-tracking tool shows that after initially having their attention caught by the main image, people engaged with the secondary features, including the parts of the offer and fake new stories.

According to the Lumen team, the success of the ad is largely due to something called schema – when our brains cope with everyday life by doing as little as possible when they can (sounds about right).

“Schema is a cognitive framework which organises the way we expect the world to work,” said Lumen.

“When it does, we carry on happily with our lives, when it doesn’t (like when there’s a massive zombie hand coming towards you out of the paper), it disrupts the passive mind and engages the cognitive processes.”

So congratulations to Sky for waking the dead.