ADVERTISING TRICKS OF THE TRADE
An advertiser’s goals are to get us to look at an ad and then read and remember the associated text. Obviously advertisers often try to attract attention by accompanying their message with provocative images. Another trick is to manipulate the text itself in ways that selectively hinder the Where system. Such techniques result in text that both attracts our attention and forces us to slow down (which means we end up spending a few more seconds looking at the ad and may therefore be more likely to remember its message).
Reading is both a Where and a What system task: the Where system conveys the overall shape of words and text for rapid, fluent recognition, and the What system carries the details of the individual letters. It is possible to read with the What system alone, but it is a much slower and more laborious process: it is therefore in the advertiser’s interest to make reading an ad a What system task alone by failing to stimulate the Where system.
One way to achieve this is to print letters of one color against an equiluminant background. As we have seen, any area with equiluminant colors is jumpy and jittery (and thus attention-getting); if it is text that is equiluminant, it has the added benefit that it is hard to read and forces you to slow down.
Advertisers also often use letters that are alternately darker and lighter than the background-alternating contrast-which has a similar slowing effect on your reading. How does this work? Because the Where system is sensitive to contrasts, alternating contrast impairs our ability to get the gestalt of the text, forcing us to read it slowly.
The use of contrasting colors, or equiluminant colors in type is not particularly widespread outside of advertising. “[The] initially exciting effect feels aggressive and often even uncomfortable to our eyes,” wrote Josef Albers. “One finds it rarely used except for a screaming effect in advertising, and as a result it is unpleasant, disliked, avoided.”
Opposite: These examples of text are similar to some advertisement that have doubtless attracted your unwilling attention at some time. In the first example, both the Where and What system are stimulated by the high-contrast text. This is easy to read.
The contrast is so low in the next example that the What system can’t see the words, but the Where system can (though not optimally). Thus you may find that you can recognize the short words by their overall shape but you have trouble with the longer words, which require letter-by-letter deciphering.
In the other four examples, the letters are clearly recognizable, but the text is nevertheless hard to read because the Where system is unable to recognize a given word by its shape, and we are forced to look at each letter individually.