Specific Media launches online eye-tracking service

Specific Media: trialled eye-tracking service for BBH clients including Lynx
Specific Media: trialled eye-tracking service for BBH clients including Lynx

Specific Media has launched an eye-tracking service to measure the effectiveness of digital creative campaigns and is trialling it with a number of BBH's clients, including Lynx, Barclays and Audi.

The service, created in partnership with EyeTrackShop, uses webcam technology to analyse how users view advertising online and calculate where and for how long the participant is looking at the ad.

Its findings from the pilot, using 360 panellists, show that an average of 11% of consumer time on webpages was spent viewing advertising. Time to fixation varied from one second to 8.5 seconds, and advertising dwell time varied from 5% to 22.5% of total time.

Ian Dowds, senior vice-president of Specific Media, said this would allow clients to pre-test creative campaigns for visual effectiveness and allow marketers to get the best ROI from their online campaigns.

He said: "Marketers require increasingly sophisticated insight into the performance of campaigns and this pilot shows the direct impact creative can have on a campaign. Quite simply, without this new technology, we wouldn’t have these insights."

Simeon Adams, strategy director of BBH, said: "This has enabled us to analyse our online campaigns with more rigour than ever before.

"Seeing how our creative is working ‘in the wild’ can help us fine-tune for effectiveness, and what the pilot clearly showed was that online display needs the right creative for the job."

In June, Specific Media partnered with Justin Timberlake to buy Myspace from News Corporation for $35m.

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