Attracting Effect of Pinpoint Auditory Glimpse on Digital Signage

Advertising signage installed in public spaces is intended to be seen by passersby to increase recognition. However, display blindness often occurs because people either assume that the displayed content is not relevant to them or the display blurs into their surroundings and they remain unaware of it. To improve advertisement recognition, it is necessary to solve display blindness. Although emitting a sound might be a solution to make passersby be aware of its presence, it would become noisy and make the space discomfort. We propose the use of a pinpoint auditory glimpse that stimulates a passerby to pay attention to signage by playing a pinpoint sound. Through acoustic measurements and participant experiments conducted in a pseudo-store, it was found that (1) the use of a pinpoint auditory glimpse can effectively trigger passersby to pay attention to signage and (2) the pinpoint auditory glimpse does not negatively impact purchasing behavior, despite emitting sound. This paper presents findings on a novel sound-based solution to the problem of display blindness.