Predicting Advertising Appeal from Receiver's Psychological Traits and Ad Design Features

Abstract

This paper studies an approach for predicting an individual's perception of the advertising appeal of ad design. Although previous research has shown that people perceive an ad as more appealing when its design matches their psychological traits, the matching required the help of psychology experts, relying on their implicit knowledge. To exclude such dependence, we examined how the psychological traits affect perceived advertising appeal by conducting a questionnaire survey. Analyzing the survey results, we confirmed that psychological traits have significant moderating effects on both visual and linguistic features of an ad design in terms of how an individual perceives advertising appeal. We also confirmed that the moderating effects as well as main effects of visual and linguistic features have significant predictive utility for perceived appeal. The model in which the both effects are incorporated predicted the most appealing ad for each person more accurately than did a human without psychology expertise (accuracy lift: mean - 1.35, max - 2.48). While further study is necessary on whether the studied approach can serve as a substitute for psychology experts, we consider the present study took the first step toward realizing this goal.