McSweeney’s has some hilarious posts these days. I particularly like this list.
“What do you say we skip the exposition and cut straight to the rising action?”
Ever wonder why most automated voices are female? Even that of Apple’s Siri? This Atlantic article does a great job of breaking down some largely unacknowledged biases.
From the article:
“In 1987, people didn’t rely on their devices the way we do today. They didn’t trust them as much. Apple needed to build that trust and wanted its then-imaginary personal assistant to project an air of competence. Natural choice? Manly avatar. But as people have gained confidence in their gadgets, the question for Apple has shifted from performance to likability. And that brings us to another point Nass makes: marketers have an easier time finding a universally likable female voice than a male one. This dovetails with the way stereotypes work; our prejudices make us dislike hearing a man go about secretarial work.”
As you might imagine, my blog post last week received double the traffic it usually does. Double. I believe I am proving my point: sex is the quick fix. Um, at least when it comes to driving traffic.
I also received some great feedback. One comment definitely deserves mentioning. I received a note from a male engineer, in the amount of detail that only a male engineer can provide, that pointed out that the blonde was displaying “more advantages” than the brunette and therefore it was not truly an apples to apples, or should I say melons to melons test.
What’s funny is that our designer and trafficker are both men and they didn’t even realize the “true” differences between the women pictured. As the engineer put it: the blonde is “showing more of her top part (maybe even the top she wears looks transparent, but not sure). And her legs are also shown. The brunette only shows her stomach.”
As I mentioned in my prior post, we do know that the fewer clothes these broads wear, the higher the click through. So I went back through the stats and took a look at our banners. The 300X250s, using the same women as in my prior post, displayed the women completely and the 728X90s only showed their heads – no bodies. The results were the same for both the 300X250s AND the 728X90s: blondes outperformed the brunettes.
To note, the best performing ad size here is the 300X250. Which we find is usually the case, no matter the content of the ad – BTW.
The engineer’s point is a good one, however. Even when testing the 728X90s, in an ideal world we’d use the same woman and just change her hair color. There might be some difference in CTR based on the individual faces used, but based on additional testing (we ran a variety of blondes and brunettes) we think we have the winning combination: Spanish ad + blonde woman + some flesh showing = a click.
Well, at least to get a man to an autos site.