The Five-Second Test

By Anesa K. Chastain Jones - Advertising Insights with Anesa

Oklahoma’s Choice Weekly

Think about the last time you sat down and carefully studied every advertisement you encountered. Chances are, you didn’t.

Most of us don’t.

We flip pages, scroll through websites, glance at signs and move quickly from one piece of information to the next. An advertisement may get only a few seconds of attention before the reader decides whether to keep looking or move on. That makes those first few seconds incredibly important.

An effective advertisement should communicate its basic message quickly. A reader shouldn’t have to study it to figure out who the advertiser is, what is being offered or why the information matters to them.

That’s where the five-second test can be useful.

Take an advertisement and show it to someone who hasn’t seen it before. Let them look at it for approximately five seconds, then take it away. Ask what they remember.

Can they name the business? Do they know what product, service, sale or event was being advertised? What caught their attention first? Did they remember a price, offer or important detail? Did they understand what they were supposed to do next?

The answers can be revealing.

If someone remembers the photograph but can’t remember the business, the visual may be overpowering the message. If they remember the business name but have no idea what was being advertised, the message may not be clear enough. If the only thing they remember is that there was a lot of information, the advertisement may simply be trying to do too much.

When More Becomes Too Much

Businesses understandably want to get as much value as possible from their advertising. That can create the temptation to fill every available inch with information.

A business may offer 15 services, but that doesn’t necessarily mean all 15 need to appear in one advertisement. The same applies to multiple phone numbers, lengthy descriptions, several photographs, social media addresses, website information, certifications, slogans, special offers and everything else that could potentially be included.

Every additional element asks for a little bit of the reader’s attention.

Eventually, instead of one clear message, the advertisement becomes a collection of competing messages.

This is why visual hierarchy matters. There should be a natural order to the information. Something catches the reader’s eye first. The next piece provides additional information. Supporting details follow. Contact information or a call to action gives an interested reader somewhere to go next.

The goal isn’t necessarily to make the advertisement simpler for the sake of simplicity. The goal is to make it easier to understand.

Give the Advertisement a Job

Before deciding what should go into an advertisement, it helps to decide what the advertisement is supposed to accomplish.

A retailer promoting a weekend sale has a different objective than a business introducing a new service. An auction company announcing an upcoming sale has different information to communicate than a company simply trying to build name recognition.

Trying to accomplish all of those things at once can weaken the message.

Ask one question before designing the ad:

What is the most important thing someone should remember after seeing this?

That answer should influence everything else.

If the purpose is to promote an event, the event and its essential details should be easy to find. If the purpose is to introduce a new product, the product shouldn’t be buried among unrelated information. If brand recognition is the goal, the business itself needs enough prominence to be remembered.

An advertisement doesn’t have to tell the entire story of a business. It needs to give the right person enough information and enough reason to take the next step.

Look at the Ad the Way a Customer Will

There’s another problem that happens frequently during the design process: advertisements are viewed under ideal conditions.

They’re enlarged on a computer monitor. They’re examined closely. They’re discussed by people who already know exactly what the advertisement is trying to communicate.

Customers don’t have those advantages.

They encounter the finished advertisement at its actual size, surrounded by other information and often while doing something else.

That’s why it’s important to evaluate an advertisement in something close to its real environment. Print it at actual size. Look at the publication as a whole. View the digital ad on a phone instead of only on a large desktop monitor.

Then look again.

What do you notice first?

Can you immediately identify the business?

Is the primary message obvious?

Can you read the information that actually matters?

Does your eye naturally move through the advertisement, or does everything demand attention at once?

Sometimes the solution isn’t making another element bigger or bolder. Sometimes it’s deciding which elements don’t need to compete for attention in the first place.

Five Seconds From the Customer’s Perspective

The five-second test isn’t a scientific measurement of whether an advertisement will succeed. Advertising effectiveness depends on many things, including the audience, message, offer, timing, placement and repetition.

But the test does accomplish something valuable: it forces us to stop looking at the advertisement as the person who created it and start looking at it as someone encountering it for the first time.

The advertiser knows what every photograph means. The advertiser knows why every sentence was included. The advertiser already recognizes the logo and understands the services.

The customer doesn’t.

They only know what they can see, understand and remember.

And sometimes five seconds is all it takes to discover whether an advertisement is communicating what you thought it was.

Before your next advertisement goes out, give it the five-second test. You may be surprised by what people remember and even more surprised by what they don’t.

ANESA K. CHASTAIN JONES, 

General Manager/Graphics Director, 

918-285-1314, graphics@oklahomaschoiceweekly.com