I was interviewed at ad:tech Sydney about how I have used Social Media Marketing to promote Tobii eye trackers! Check out this new video from The Interzone and Shift Interactive.

Episode 4: The Interzone @ Ad:Tech from The Interzone TV on Vimeo.

I had a call today from an Australian university that has a grant in for a couple of Tobii eye trackers.

The psychology professor asked, “I’ve got various other collaborators that I want to get involved in the grant process. One has asked, Can you track mice?”

“Of course!”, I responded. “Tobii have set up Studio to track mouse data when the eye calibration isn’t successful. That way usability people get data even when the test participant isn’t eye tracked.”

“Sorry”, he said. “I think you have misunderstood. I meant a mouse.”

“An animal!”, I exclaimed.

“Why?”

Can you do your presentations in one minute? I just took, Jeff Carruthers, a guy in the business of social networking, through the Slideshare presentation below in one minute. When I delivered it first time, at an AIMIA public presentation, it took 15!

This presentation design also makes the show very easy to click through on Slideshare. No-one reads shows slowly on there do they? I know I don’t!

So, for your next presentation, see if you can click through it at a rate of knots and still get the gist. If not, you probably haven’t used a technique similar to Garr Reynolds’ Presentation Zen approach to design your slide deck. That means you have used too many words and not enough pictures.

Here’s another that you can click through real quick!

Stay tuned, I have another presentation technique half ready to share but no time to write the full post!

People look at other people’s faces.

In this video I showed that even my 11 month old son, Benjamin James Breeze, looks straight at faces shown to him in Facebook! It is habitual.

Did you know that the images of faces that capture people’s attention can be used to guide people around a website or an ad? I thought it was obvious! However, when I was representing Objective Digital at ad:tech Sydney 09 last week I mentioned it to people, and they were amazed! I realised it was worth posting about it!

Here’s a little experiment with 106 people that I’ve demonstrated the Tobii T60 eye tracker to over the last month or so.

The image below is a sample gaze path of one person looking at a baby in a product ad:

The blobs are where the person has fixated on the image. You’ll notice the person starts looking in the middle of the page (we planned it that way by using a fixation cross between each stimuli)  and then goes straight to the baby face.  He focusses on it a few times then moves his attention over to the text by his 7th fixation.

And here’s an image of that same baby looking up and toward the main content heading. Notice the person fixates less on the baby’s face and then he quickly looks straight over to the text at the 5th fixation.

One person you say?

Well, here’s a combined heat map of 106 people looking at the first image. The redder the spot, the more time people looked at it.

There is heaps of focus on the baby’s face and relatively little on the text.

Here’s the same 106 people looking at the second image for  the same amount of time (The images were shown in a to everyone in a random order on Tobii Studio software running with a Tobii T60 eye tracker).

Notice how many more people are actually reading the text that the baby is looking at in the above image? Not to mention the increased attention on the brand!

In advertising we will look at what the person we see in an ad is looking at.  If they are looking out at us we will simply look back at them and not really anywhere else.

Faces can be used to guide a person’s attention to key content and make sure they actually read it.

What are you looking at?

I just found the ‘environmentally friendly’ bamboo memory stick that I was given at OZCHI 08 in my drawer.

I’ve never used it because:

1) It doesn’t look like a memory stick

But you can hang it round your neck!

2) It doesn’t fit

Phat USB - Please take all your other USB cables out. Oh and your video cable too!

Unless you use one of these…

A use for that cable at last!

I have another memory stick that was designed by a moron.

But it looks cool...

Both ‘oh, so creative’! Lucky they were free…

Star Trek did a pretty good job

And for $600 these days you can get a widescreen personal media viewer!