Brands, Verticals and Contexts: Coherence Patterns in Consumer Attention

Consumers are expected to partially reveal their preferences and interests through the media they consume. The development of visual attention measurement with eye tracking technologies allows us to investigate the consistency of these preferences across the creative executions of a given brand and over all brands within a given vertical. In this study we use a large-scale attention measurement dataset to analyse a collection of digital display advertising impressions across a variety of industry verti- cals. We evaluate the extent to which the high attention contexts for a given brand’s ads remain consistent for that brand, and the extent to which those contexts remain consistent across many brands within an industry vertical. The results illustrate that consumer attention on advertising can vary significantly across creatives for a specific brand, and across a vertical. Nevertheless, there are coherence effects across campaigns that are stronger than random, and that contain actionable information at the level of industry vertical categorisation.