Men and Women Really Do See Things Differently

The old advertising adage "sex sells" may be recognized worldwide, but new research conducted by EyeTrackShop, creators of online eye-tracking technology, shows exactly how men and women are drawn into looking at a sexy ad.

Over a two-day span, 100 participants looked at three different online ads as a test:

1. H&M showing a beautiful woman in a bikini;
2. Reebok featuring a woman wearing nothing except shoes; and
3. Saab with a picture of one of its car, along with product information and logo.

Consistent with previous studies, no gender-specific differences were revealed regarding eye gaze patterns. Men and women demonstrated an almost identical behavior regarding which parts of the ad that they looked at. On the other hand, the fixation order — the order in which respondents glance at different features of an ad — disclosed a surprising difference between the sexes. While men first looked at the face of the woman in the ad, women looked first at the torso of the almost-naked woman. Apparently, women gaze at other womens' bodies more eagerly than men.

The women in the study spent 20 percent more time looking at the legs of the woman in the H&M ad than the men did. The difference between the sexes in the Reebok ad was even more profound, as the women spent 36 percent more time looking at the undressed woman’s legs. In addition, while the women in the study spent time more gazing at the womens' bodies in the ads, the men spent more time looking at the womens' faces. In both of the ads, the men in the study spent 40 percent more time than the women looking at the womens' faces.

The results also showed that women, to a greater extent than men, spent time looking at the products displayed in the ads — i.e., the bikini and the shoes.

After examining the face and body of the women in the ads, both men and women looked to the left at the ad text and then down to the legs, where men spent 20 percent less time looking than women.
In the Reebok ad, women spent 50 percent more time looking at the shoes, whereas men barely noticed them. However, even here men spent 40 percent more time on the woman's face, but 50 percent longer on her posterior.

If you're targeting a one-gender audience, you have to be cognizant in your ads of where you put the text and logo compared to people. With men, be sure the text is near the face; with women, move the text lower.

The beauty of EyeTrackShop is that eyes don’t lie. Companies can know for sure if the product or key message is being viewed, for how long and in what order. There's no more guessing or arguing needed over which ad, package or creative is better. As we saw with the Reebok and H&M ads, what we think men and women look at isn't necessarily what they really look at.

Jeff Bander is senior vice president of client services at EyeTrackShop, formerly MRC International. You can connect with Jeff on LinkedIn.