Over the last few years moving images have become an important part of marketers demands.Photos and other static formats have had to make room for better performing media such as videos, animated gifs and cinemagraphs. Success of these formats drives from Technological advances. But we can also address this success from different perspectives in which our minds perceive static and dynamic images.
There is a complex algorithm that how our eyes move over an image.Those, who are aware of this algorithm and expert about it, such as the great painters, photographers and film directors can manage viewer’s attention and control the direction of eye over an image.Unfortunately, generic stock photos or commercial images generally fail about it. Those images are quickly lose our attention.
On the other hand, moving images have an remarkable element that we called movement. Even the movement is very small, our eye detects the every little motion quickly. This behavior is coming from our ancestors’ need for self-preservation. Our brains are very sensitive of everything happening around us in order to keep us safe. This is called “passive attention,” one of the six human attention modes first classified by the american psychologist William James in 1980. We are detecting the movements around us in order to evaluate whether it poses a threat to us. Our ancestors turned this passive awareness to “active” awareness when hunting for food. At that time sharp senses were very essential for hunter-gatherers.
Nowadays hunger and safety is not an issue, we still have same instinct but now we use them in a different context. In modern-day ‘hunting’ for clicks and ‘likes’, it’s less about our own instincts, and more about exploiting those of our audience. Modern hunters (digital marketers) are venturous in order to get the attention of audiences. They search for hundreds of ways and test so many strategies in order to get user’s interests . The most influential are those, which speak to an audience’s “Id”(The primitive and instinctive component of personality) – Freud’s term for subconsciousness. And that’s where cinemagraphs come in: as images with a motion element, they capture the user’s attention and direct the eye of the user, often resulting in more clicks and longer session times.
All in all, moving images attract more attention because of physiological reasons. In addition to this, there are some researches that moving faces are easier to recognize. Some experiments showed that images of famous faces were better recognised when they were displayed moving, compared with a single static image. One of the reason marketers prefer moving images can be stem from this psycological reason. For instance, watching a Tv commercial can be more catchy than a static poster design for same commercial. This also applies to instagram posts. Animated gif posts are more attractive for audiences compare to static posts. I am going to make deeper research about the psychological reasons behind it in order to make clear the sucess of the moving images.
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