The effect of human face and gaze direction in advertising

Abstract

Advertising is the most common form of communicating in marketing and employing human face in advertisement, is one of the most popular ways of influencing the audience. Also, advertising can survive and increase business growth if its effectiveness is appropriately determined and investigated. Ideally, advertising effectiveness in market must be analysed by standard and effective techniques, which can be assessed through complementing advantages of 'communicational' and 'observational' methods. Due to the lack of a native related study in Iranian literature, this experimental study conducted on Iranian participants. Results indicate that the use of human face leads to better attitude towards the advertisement and attract more attention, especially to the image part of the advertisement. In particular, the presence of human faces causes less attention to the product that is being advertised, a smart use of 'human gaze' can disengage attention from the face and direct it towards the ad's product and message.