In this Sunday’s edition of the New York Times, Brooks Barns wrote about the new Disney user testing lab in Austin, Texas. Disney is testing the way users respond to online advertising, and in typical Disney fashion, it sounds evil:
“Dr. Varan and his 14-member team use heart-rate monitors, skin temperature readings and facial expressions (probes are attached to facial muscles) to reach conclusions.”
Photo by Erich Schlegel for The New York Times
Dr. Varan is Duane Varan, the user lab’s executive director. This Tuesday, that is, tomorrow, he will unveil Disney’s findings to a group of advertisers in New York. This marks a change in the normally reality-denying corporate attitude (i.e. music execs and their barrage of lawsuits against the music downloaders).
Disney’s findings will be well researched. They have tested a large amount and suitably “wide range” number of participants (although none are children) to see how they respond to ads when they saw them, as opposed to clicked on them. This is something that is very hard to measure — unless you follow that person out of the lab and see if they eventually purchase whatever you recorded them looking at online.
Here’s what they’ve found, or what they’ve found that they’ve released to the public:
- Flyout ads are equally as effective as transparency ads (although how effective that is, we don’t know)
- News tickers that run alongside ads don’t stop people from looking at ads
Hopefully, we will know more after their presentation. What I hope they have studied as well, is the intrusiveness of these ads and how much of noticing them is negative. What is the value of knowing that someone looked at a transparency ad (one that lies on top of content, but is see-through), for 3.4 seconds, if the whole time they are cursing that ad in annoyance? Cursing is something that surely does not usually happen in a user testing environment.
It would be nice if Disney reveals their methodologies as well as their findings tomorrow. Is testing advertising the same as testing website functionality? No one goes online simply to look at ads of course, so all of this research should accompany some task assignments, as per normal user testing. And how does one test something beyond action — someone’s emotional response and how persuaded he or she is to something? It’s a questions that plagues all user tests, but especially for ones testing advertising.