• by Mike Bloxham , Op-Ed Contributor, November 28, 2007

In recent weeks I seem to have found myself having a surprising number of conversations with people about the "Lower Third" of the TV screen. These are far from the first conversations I've had on the subject, but it just seems that the same basic set of questions are on a lot of people's minds right now.

I guess it's entirely understandable that the Lower Third is exercising thoughtful industry minds right now. After all, that particular piece of screen real estate has long since become established as a preferred space for promotional messaging, channel idents and -- more recently in slected DMAs -- advertising enhancements where some level of interactivity has been deployed. And, of course, it's where your faithful TV Guide is likely to pop up if you use it in partial-screen mode (depending on your MSO) --not to mention the ever-faithful news ticker.

All in all then, the Lower Third is kind of like the billboards that we pass on the roads as we travel from place to place. They aren't what we are looking for, but they come into our field of view and may or may not benefit from some level of attention, possibly even delivering a message that might be retained and recalled at some later point.

And therein lies the heart of the questions most people seem to have right now -- which seem to be driven by an apparent lack of any publicly available research into the extent to which viewers pay attention to content in the Lower Third, how long it needs to be onscreen to be effective, the impact of surrounding content, variances between Lower Third content that appears in programming versus advertising (as enhancements) and the issue of Lower Third advertising content appearing in programming. (If any of you out there know of any good and available research on the subject, please post a link on the TV Board -- you'll be doing a lot of people a favor).

The questions I'm being asked are all coming from major players in the TV space who already invest in the Lower Third, but who seemingly have little or no evidence to support the widespread industry practices that conventional wisdom tells us are the right thing to do. This doesn't mean that people are doing the wrong thing, but it almost certainly means that things aren't being done as effectively as they might. Of course some people have done their own research but they are keeping it close to their chests in pursuit of competitive advantage, though most are not in that happy position.

For our own part, at the Center for Media Design we have done some informal research on some of these issues, most notably through the use of eye-tracking to determine the distribution of attention while viewing TV from the 10- to 12-foot distance during advertising and programming time and when promotional fly-ins or snipes (the terminology varies) are on-screen. Using this approach, we are able to measure the gaze path of subjects very precisely (down to two tenths of a second) to determine exactly where they look, in which sequence and for how long they dwell on specific things onscreen and so on. Interestingly, in a methodological test that we intend to expand upon, we found very little direct attrention was paid to promotional snipes during programming and that recall after the programming segment had been viewed was nonexistent or minimal at best. Mis-attribution was an occasional result of someone remembering seeing a picture of a group of people that they presumed to be the cast of one show when they were in fact the cast of another (most likely an example of a respondent guessing).

However, this relatively straightforward test where all respondents were shown the same stimulus material in the same setting, belies the complexity of researching the issues associated with the use of the Lower Third. After all, not only will different types of content raise different questions and responses (e.g. what about sports content related to the content in the main part of the screen versus more generic sports info --likewise for news), but the programming and advertising context will also influence findings; as will respondents' relationship with the content.

Then there is the multitude of issues raised by the screen design above the Lower Third and the matter of timing. We know from our own work that human faces on screen and fast-paced editing / action sequences attract visual attention and will therefore logically detract from anything happening in the Lower Third. After all, how long did it take most of us to learn where banner ads tended to be placed on the Web and to associate animated rectangles with advertising -- and therefore not look at them? If you've been involved in usability work on the Web, you've undoubtedly been impressed with our ability to visually screen out what we believe to be irrelevant -- and the same is true of TV.

Despite the lack of widely available research on these and related issues, the use of the Lower Third is not about to diminish -- indeed, it will increase. And when the digital switchover happens, there will be even more reason to make use of it, particularly for advertising-related purposes. All the more reason, then, why the Lower Third should be a little higher up the industry's collective research agenda going forward, than has been the case in the past.