Gripping the Gist: What Ads Communicate in a Single Glance

This study investigates if consumers can extract any meaning from ads that receive only a cursory and coarse glance, which is common in ad practice, and whether companies’ investments in all ads that receive such a glance are completely wasted. We find that typical ads communicate their gist better and faster than atypical ads under these conditions, and that they capture immediate interest. In less than 100 msec., consumers already know with a high degree of certainty whether something is an ad or editorial material, and--if the ad is typical--which product category is advertised. Even the advertised brands are identified well above chance levels. Such snapshot perception is based on consumers’ visual memories of typical ads, and on coarse visual information in the ads. Even rudimentary “blobs” of visual information suffice to grasp the gist of typical ads, but atypical ads require more detail and lag far behind. We propose a new AdGist metric to assess this immediate performance of advertising in a single glance.