Lumen Eye Tracking Analysis Platform

William
Lever, the 19th century soap entrepreneur famously said “I know half my advertising
isn't working, I just don't know which half.” This simple statement (which remains all too true
today) continues to have massive implications for the UK economy - advertising spend in the
UK was over £17B in 2012, a huge cost for UK brands in food, fashion, financial and all other
consumer facing sectors. At the same time, this advertising underpins the UK’s commercial
performance - each £1 spent on advertising returns at least £6 to GDP through increased
consumer confidence and spending, showing advertising’s fundamental importance to those
companies, brands and the wider UK economy.
Given the level of investment in advertising and the economic activity it supports,
understanding where and how to most effectively spend this money to get the most impact is
critically important. Oddly in the light of this, very little scientific and quantitative work has
been done in evaluating how effective specific adverts are with their target audiences, and
what specifically makes an advert engaging to its audience in a way that drives sales activity.
Lumen Research aims to address this by prototyping an evidence based platform on which an
audience’s reaction to specific adverts can be recorded, analysed and used to create scoring
models that will predict an advert’s likely effectiveness. The platform will use the latest
generation of eye tracking technology coupled with facial coding systems capable of
interpreting the unconscious facial movements of a panel of test subjects. Large panels of test
subjects will be shown real-world adverts to disentangle the principles behind advert design
that most effectively drive audience engagement and buying behaviours. This scoring model
will power a highly scalable web based SAAS platform so that an audience’s reactions can be
used to score and provide real-time feedback on the relative effectiveness of one advert design
against another