It is a central part of the research from the psychology of perception that the placement of images on an advertising page needs to be handled with great care. While text is generally perceived by the left hemisphere of the brain, the image is generally seen on the right, and given the limited amount of interaction that there is between the two halves of the brain, putting text and pictures next to each other can put off all but the most committed reader.
Now there is new evidence that the unwillingness to give time to adverts where images and text knock up against each other is related to age.
Let me add another caveat first, however. We are talking here about the readership of advertising material by people who are not immediately drawn to the subject matter. Consider the advert you receive which maybe relates to you in general – but is not of instant specific interest. (For example, a music teacher receives an advert about GCSE music books. That’s fine – although if he is not thinking of buying any more books, feeling his GCSE resources are ok, it is not of direct interest to him.)
It seems that people of more mature years (for example your average heads of department) find the close juxtaposition of image and text even more off putting than those of younger years – and they find it hard enough to focus with ads of this type.
Older buyers prefer single-image advertisements over ads with multi-image collages by a margin of 66% to 34%, according to a recent image-preference survey by Creating Results (http://www.creatingresults.com/) .
Their Photo Finish study set out to look at which type of photography is most effective when advertising to those aged 40 plus. What they discovered was not just the expected difference in preference of photographs, but in the responsiveness to pictures overall – a finding that fits totally with the earlier findings from the psychology perception.
Interestingly while the separation of picture from text always improves response rates among less committed readers this effect is enhanced even further with older readers.