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The article “Breaking Through Fast-Forwarding: Brand Information and Visual Attention” by Adam Brasel and James Gips presents the results of a research study that could prove to be of immense help to marketers. The advent of Digital Video Recorders such as TiVo, which enable consumers to fast-forward advertisements even on live TV, has presented a significant challenge to marketers in terms of getting their message across in an effective manner. The results of the study indicate that increasing the amount of brand information in the centre of the screen helps capture consumers’ attention even when fast-forwarding the content.
While the study itself is quite unique and throws up several firsts both for researchers (eye-tracker tool) and marketers (solution to the problem of fast-forwarding) and provides a semblance of control over advertising to the marketers, the solutions presented are at best temporary, in my opinion. As the communication media evolved from print to electronic to online, so did the advertising but unfortunately for the marketers, so did the consumer behaviour too. Advertising audience no longer trust the marketers and are increasingly relying on word of mouth promotions generated by social media. In light of this fact, it becomes imperative for the marketers to involve the consumers in a collaborative effort in order to win over their trust and thus increase the effectiveness of advertising.
Although the recommendations made by the study are commendable, one major drawback of them is that they work only for reminder ads where the goal is brand exposure and memory and are not very effective for ads that focus on brand attribute knowledge or brand positioning. "We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them" – true to what Albert Einstein said, marketers will have to evolve their thinking and their advertisements in order to effectively communicate their messages. One such approach could be to vary the length and timing of ads; the article mentions lack of conclusive effects of this approach, perhaps further research could highlight some hidden insights.
Alternately, marketers can reduce their advertising budgets for television commercials and instead focus on other avenues like social media, radio etc. A third approach can be the “if you can’t beat them, join them” approach. Curiosity is primal human nature and every consumer actively seeks information before making a purchase – marketers can leverage this by partnering with DVR manufacturers to enable users to select the type of ads that they want to watch and telecast only those.
In conclusion, I would like say that although consumers are increasingly eschewing advertising in its conventional form, their thirst for information is still intact and therein lays the challenge for marketers to create alternative means of quenching that thirst.
Vijay Bhargav Ganti (Roll# 9358)
Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai, India

The author in his article ”The Curse of Competitiveness: How Advice from experienced Colleagues and Training Can Hurt Marketing Profitability stresses upon the fact on how the decisions taken by the junior and middle level managers after getting advice from their more experienced peers can do more harm than good to the bottom-line of the company. It also emphasises the fact that the training imparted to a trainee manager goes a long way in his approach of doing more harm to the nearest competitor than thinking about his profits.

To prove his point the author Prof Siva Balasubramanian the author cites the experiment conducted on a set of 64 students divided into 2 groups, who were given an advertisement budget and asked to utilise it. Advertisement spendings were categorised as low. medium, high and max. Spending a medium amount both by the students and the perceived competitors would offer the maximum returns for both the parties. They were allowed to play a few rounds and after each round their earnings were flashed on a screen. They were then asked to make way for the second group of students on the condition that their profits will be linked to the performance of the second group and they can advice the other group of students. Armed with the advice from the first group it was seen that the second group of students were more interested in reducing the profits of the competitors by adopting an aggressive approach both when they lead the competitors in revenue in the first round and also when they fared badly compared to the competitor.
In the second experiment a group of 57 managers in an executive program was selected and trained as employees of a beer company which had fared badly the previous year. As expected the negative traits of causing harm to the competitors took centre-stage over the own company profits.

Though the sample size of the population was small and the students inexperienced in the first example the author did a good job in displaying deftly in what he intended.

The article by S. Adam Brasel & James Gips “Breaking through Fast-Forwarding: Brand Information and Visual Attention” is a revelation for marketers and those interested in further research in Visual Marketing. They have studied how the increased use of digital video recorder is leading to fast forwarding of the advertisements and what can be done by marketers to retain the effectiveness of advertising. This research work is especially important as Nielsen Media Research has estimated that that 20% of U.S. homes had DVRs as of mid-2007 and this number will escalate to 40% by the turn of the decade. It implies that more and more users will be fast forwarding the advertisement content and shoving millions of dollars spent in abyss.
Their research work propounds that DVR fast forwarding has a negative effect on the ad effectiveness .It also posits diagnostic measures to minimize the damage and shows how to increase the ad effectiveness while fast forwarding by the users. There are 3 important findings:
1. Fast-forwarding viewers strongly focus their attention on a central area of the screen.
2. The center of the screen captures increased visual fixations when viewers fast-forward regardless of the bumper logo location.
3. Advertisements with heavy central branding can yield a positive effect on attitude toward the brand, behavioural intent, and actual behaviour.
The above findings can be incorporated by marketers in the ad design for reminder advertisements in which the main goal is brand exposure and memory .Advertisers have been recommended not to load their ads with high information content and keep their ads simple.

With the increase in the DVR (Digital Video Recorders) subscriptions worldwide the big market we are going to see emerging is India & China. With business opportunities for DVR opening up in these humongous markets TV advertising is going to experience a huge change. DVR users are known to skip the advertisements while watching DVR. And hence the article is rightly addressing this issue as marketers can then modify the controllable variables to make the advertising more effective. Eye-tracker technology, attention capture studies and brand attitude & behavior is needed for us to check the technical aspect of this change and how we can handle this. Fast forwarding forces the user only to concentrate on the middle of the screen and hence advertisers can now make their advertisement compatible to such behaviors.
Some of the aspects of fast forwarding central advertising can be applied to other mediums too where people see the advertising in a flash while driving or while surfing. The advertising of bigger brands can hence use this study to make their banners & pop-ups taking a leaf from this study. Another implication can be its use in the newspaper advertising industry.
But even as I say this, some more studies to address such insight should be made to locate information strategically.
Vishal Desai (Roll No: 9359)
Great Lakes Institute Of Management, Chennai

With advancing technology it is becoming increasingly difficult for advertisers to capture the attention of customers. A case in point is DVR technology (e.g. TiVo) which enables customers to fast forward through advertisements on television. In the article “Breaking through Fast Fast-Forwarding: Brand Information and Visual Attention”, authors S. Adam Brasel and James Gips discuss their research findings on how advertisers may overcome these technologies in order to continue advertising effectively on television.

Through this paper, the authors have shared empirical evidence that while fast forwarding, viewers pay strong attention to the central location of the television screen. The reason for the increased focus was that the viewers did not want to miss the part when the show began again. Thus any fast forwarded advertisement with central branding has the capacity to build increased brand attitude and behavioral intent.

This has interesting implications for advertisers. Shorter, faster commercials in which brand information is prominently positioned to appear at the center of the television screen may actually be a more effective television commercial. Also it may be more prudent to place very short, quick, commercials during a television program instead of at the beginning of it. This way customers won’t find it worthwhile to skip over the very short advertisements and would sit through those. And finally shorter commercials would also cost less to air on television.

This research paper is a commendable effort to understand how a technological disadvantage can be overcome and can actually be used to the advantage of the advertisers. The findings of this paper give interesting insights on how it conclusions can be used by advertisers to make more effective and less expensive commercials.

The article “Breaking Through Fast-Forwarding: Brand Information and Visual Attention” by Adam Brasel and James Gips is an interesting one, in that it attempts to go down to the basic technicalities of advertisement perception by consumers. Advertisers need to continually be at the top of the process of innovation because of many challenges that they face. Consumers have the choice of numerous television channels that they can switch through. Also, Digital Video Recording devices give the consumer the ability to fast forward ads even on live television. This article, thus, attempts to provide an insight into the consumers’ perception of ads that are being fast forwarded and in turn help advertisers design ads that can make more impact accordingly. Although statistically robust, the study and its solutions present some shortcomings that have been discussed below.

The first one is in the contention that centrally placing the crux of the advertisement and coupling it with heavy branding makes the ad more effective. This type of advertisement can only effective for umbrella brands, e.g. Vodafone can flash its logo at the centre of the screen and make the consumers aware of is presence in the market. It cannot, however, advertise any of its particular schemes since such forms of advertisement require more information to be transmitted. Thus, in such a scenario, a regular television advertisement would out-compete a fast forwarded one.

Secondly, the research article has only concentrated on branding, leveraging on the viewer’s attention on the centre of the screen. The authors could have expanded the scope of the article to products that are not so dependent on branding. They could have included in their research, advertisements that are more information dependant. An example would be a research conducted along the lines of using the other areas of the screen –apart from the centre- for advertising, while making the centre the guide to the viewer’s attention to the informative regions of the screen. This way, the article could have attempted to analyse all aspects of the efficacy of fast forward advertising.

Third, concluding that only by heavily branding a product, one can make fast forward advertisement effective, means that the scope of fast forward ads is being limited to brand recall. In all practicality, heavy branding can be effective in a fast forward ad only if the viewer is already aware of the brand, e.g. a quick ad of Microsoft Windows might be flashed at the centre of the screen in a fast forward ad, thereby effectively making the user recall the Microsoft Windows brand, which already places a very significant brand equity footprint. If, instead, a new brand were to be launched and advertised in the same manner, the user would probably not be able to cognize its existence since he/she does not have any prior knowledge of it.

Fourth, the conclusion mentioned in the article, effectively ends up equating television advertisement to print advertisement, thereby negating the benefits of television ads over the latter. In fact, print advertisement would probably encompass more information and can prove more cost effective for the advertising organization. It would have thus been better if the article had attempted to make use of the unique features of television advertisement and encompass them in effective fast forward advertisement instead of concentrating on eliminating the same.

In conclusion, the article presents a robust statistical research on a subject in which insight is well needed. In fact, the aspects mentioned in the article can be very useful for advertising brand intensive products. However, by increasing the scope of the article slightly, the researchers could have made it more holistic.

Soumyo Mitra (Roll No. 9347), Sweta Kanumuri (Roll No. 9354), Tanushri Sharma (Roll No. 9355)
Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai, India.

The article “Breaking Through Fast-Forwarding: Brand Information and Visual Attention” by Adam Brasel and James Gips very lucidly explains how the Fast Forwarding alters the visual attention and how the centrally located visual brand information drives the advertisement effectiveness. It also explains and finds out that the information located at the centre of the screen is attended to more. The study cleverly finds out that fast forwarding advertisements with heavy central branding can lead to increased brand attitude and behavioural intent, whereas advertisements with limited branding have little or no effect. The Mere Exposure Effect has been shown to work very effectively while fast forwarding the advertisements.
However the choice of the participants as being undergraduate students seems to be an extended generalization. Since the people exposed to the normal advertisements come from different walks of life, it would have been better if the sample of participants had a more diverse background. The article fails to mention if the response to such an exposure is dependent upon the type of product being advertised. I.e. if the eatables, consumer durables, apparels etc produce the same effect on the viewer. Further study can be proposed in this direction which would help the marketer advertise accordingly.
Though the article is concise in itself but I believe it could have been related to the road side sign boards which display part of the message one after another at equidistant location on the road. When you drive past these boards at high speed you get the message in entirety which could have been lost had the message been on a single board. Moreover the style of the message can be tailored in such a way to expose the driver sub-consciously to the brand information.

Tabish Maqsood(9462)
Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai, India

The article in general talks about the effectiveness of the ads in relation to the screen position and FF effects. The idea of FF is found to be effective but the article does not take into consideration the following points:
- Screen Background – the features of the background like color, brightness of the display, font of the content are not taken into consideration. These features also create a visual impact on the sensory perception of an individual.

- Given the prior assumption that when the ad is played at the centre of the screen it is assumed that nothing else appears at any other part of the screen, the TV screen usually displays more than one thing at a time and this will mitigate the impact of the simulated effects the advertiser provides.

- The set of consumers that won’t recognize the impacts are:

1) New viewers who will not be able to recognize the brand as they will first get caught up by the FF affects.

2) Consumers with poor eyesight, old age, children, people watching television while engaged in their work will not get the affect which the ad intents to

3) Consumers who are the users of the brand or those who are in need of that brand and do not belong to the segment mentioned above will be directly impacting the company’s goal.

- Sourabh Dubey, 9348
- Swapan Kumar, 9352
-Ranjit Chrastopher, 9336
Great Lakes Institute of Management
Consumer Behavior Section B - Group G5