The Role of Location and Visual Saliency in Capturing Attention to Outdoor Advertising: How Location Attributes Increase the Likelihood for a Driver to Notice a Billboard Ad

The current authors' research addressed the importance of a billboard's location and visual saliency in capturing consumer attention. Visual saliency refers to an advertisement's ability to stand out and attract attention because of its use of color, shading, and compositional design. Building on data from an existing eye-tracking study from the Traffic Audit Bureau for Media Measurement, Inc. (TAB, renamed Geopath in September 2016), the authors found that visual salience has some, but limited, influence on drivers' attention to billboard advertising. Rather, a billboard's location contributed more to the understanding of the distribution of attention in complex environments like roadside advertising. These billboard attributes explained two-thirds of the observed variance in the author's models.