Hello my nerdy friends,
Have you ever considered how lighting affects the effectiveness of ads?
Here’s why you should.
The study:
Researchers took product ads and made two versions of each. One was lit from the left. The other from the right.
45 students saw these ads. First, they saw two versions of the same ad and picked which one they liked more. Then they saw single ads and rated three things on a 7-point scale: how much they liked the ad, how much they liked the brand, and how likely they were to buy the product (Hutchison et al., 2011).
🧪What they found:
When people rated one ad at a time, left-lit ads got better scores than right-lit ads.
People gave higher ratings to the ad itself, higher ratings to the brand, and higher purchase intention when the product was lit from the left.
Though, when the ads were placed side-by-side, there was no clear left-light preference.
Why?
Why do people like left-side lighting? Researchers still don’t know.
Earlier studies found that people usually expect light to come from above. One study found they prefer it slightly from the left, about 26° left of straight above. This paper also says researchers have not found an environmental reason for that bias (Mamassian & Goutcher, 2001). Other studies found that people read shapes better when images use left-side lighting. They are also more likely to see left-lit objects as convex (Elias & Robinson, 2005).
My guess is that in the western world we mostly read left to right, so our brains would expect light to be on the left, and the shadow on the right, because light is the “cause“ and the shadow is the “result”, so it makes sense that we would expect the cause to be before the result. But this is pure speculation😅
In any case, when an ad uses left-side lighting, that matches with what our brain expects( even though we’re not sure why), our brains can read the image more easily. When something is easier to process, we tend to like it more. That may help explain why ads with left-lighting got higher ratings and higher purchase intent in this study.
Caveat
This study used 45 students, so take this with a grain of salt.
It also measured purchase intent, not real purchases.
💡Takeaway
If you have control over lighting in your ads, test left-side lighting in your product images.
See you next week,
Ksenia (the biggest nerd)
P.S. Just an update: Facebook still hasn’t returned my account🙃 They said they’ve “escalated the case to a specialized team“(classic). But, at this point I couldn’t care less, because I found a workaround for managing client ads, so yay! If you’re in a similar position, reply to this email, I’ll be happy to share what worked for me.
P.P.S. And a word from today’s sponsor, Wistia!
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