Michael Schiessl, CEO and managing director of eye square, opened the conference with a broad presentation of how digital market research has developed over the last 25 years – and how eye square has evolved as a company - from usability to UX and on to human experience – to reflect this evolution. Schiessl presented the elements of human experience which is always a combination of perception (sys0), emotion (sys1) and reason (sys2). All three „systems“ are the object of eye square’s work – all three require their own respective methods. eye square has been refining its research into the full human experience – and integrated them into one holistic approach that uses science, technology and art.  As media and marketing are rapidly changing along multiple axes, Schiessl showed that change and innovation often come from the margins - and is often preceded by implicit devlopments that can be traced early by the right research. As such today’s most resonant brands appeal not just to consumers’ love, but to their souls. Schiessl emphasized the importance of values and virtues - and the desire for genuine experiences. This desire is shaping user behavior, and as technology evolves, so do human expectations: From mere functionality (usability), to pleasure and pragmatism (UX), and ultimately to hopes and values (human experience). Brands and media must take this into account.

eye square’s Marvin Vogt featured the capabilities of eye square’s new digital sandbox, which allows customers to understand every detail of their own ads, products or whole campaigns on any platform by changing and measuring the performance of every detail - and the futuristic vision of eye square’s CTO Andreas Thoelke, who presented the idea of a sandboxing approach that allows brands to interact with customers via co-creative stories - and thus truly make research part of creation and vice versa.

Tobias Hopp of OMD Germany explained the rationale behind the new „Attention Works“ partnership between OMD and eye square. In a fragmented media market knowing the actual impact of reach has become imperative. Combining the expertise of both companies – especially OMD multi-screen maximizer and eye square’s excellence in attention measurement - will help customers choose media mixes for maximum effective reach. Interesting research showed surprising differences in platform performances. Not all reach appears to be equal in terms of attention. And quite simply, more attention means greater impact.

Freenet’s Inga Scharfenberger teamed up with eye square Chief Experience Office Carina Lehne de Lopez to show how the sandbox allowed freenet to create and test its way to better utilizing its digital assets. Without using scarce developer resources the company developed high fidelity prototypes and launched an improved website for one of its most popular products, relying on a mix of implicit / explicit of surveys and click-tracking instead of just just survey data and live A/B testing.

Max Pietzker, from eye square’s UX team explained how sandboxing can be a design process from scratch, from imported designs and the combination of both. The possibilities are almost unlimited. Users can create and test content like whole webpages or details like for example consent forms. The easy design creation saves resources and adds behavioral testing options and insights, making the Sandbox a co-creation and collaboration tool that is fast and insightful.

eye square’s  Senior Vice President Shopper Experience Felix Metger showed how the „Digital Commerce Sandbox“ adds real value to brands by helping them understand the shopping universe better and making smarter retail media investments. Whereas old methods were limited in terms of their realism, the Sandbox creates and measures realistic shopper journeys in basically all digital commerce contexts – with real and real experiences. Through the digital sandbox researchers are empowered and enabled to control and analyze environments, while participants actually enjoy the experience of interacting with the tool. Questions like: „How far do they scroll down and across?“, or: „Do they watch creator content?“, are easily answered.

Amara Waqar, Digital Transformation Leader of MarsWrigley Europe, together with Felix Metger, showed the audience how eye square helped the candy giant solve the puzzle of online impulse shopping which consists of choosing and designing stimuli at dozens of potential touch points. With 30-40 tests annually and more than 140.000 shoppers at mimicked stores such as Tesco, Walmart, Amazon, Carrefour, Uber Eats and many other in all contintents, this research has helped MarsWrigley stay successful even amidst the revolution in consumer behavior.

Dirk Ziems of concept m ai introduced the audience to trained AI personas, which can help tremendously in optimization of digital assets by testing them faster and at much lower cost before further investments. Synthetic interviews with AI personas can be conducted at scale bringing actual insights about impact before implementation. Creative archetypes, for example, can grade creations according to different factors – such as social media fit, story telling, brand impact (positive / negative), communications KPIs, and compare them with other creations‘ ratings and come up with recommendations.

While AI makes great strides in many fields, it still comes up short in others. One of those fields is eye-tracking, which is a specialty of eye square. As Felix Fischer, head of data analysis and digital services elaborated, predictive results of „specialized eye tracking AI“ have improved, but different AI products for gaze predictions still deliver puzzling results on some tasks, while having markedly improved in others during the last couple of years. Overall eye square „quality of predicted analysis“ index shows, that sAI has increased from 56 to about 62% accuracy since 2023. Companies seeking to automate eye tracking should always still use real eye tracking to verify results when more complex tasks are at hand. Key problems that persist are, when demographics, motion, contrast, salience, complexityor non-human objects are involved.

Coming to Berlin live from his California office, Takeshi Tawarada,  Research & Insights Lead for Augmented Reality & Attention at Snap Inc., presented findings from a joint study by snap and eye square on the marketing power of generative AI and augmented reality. The comprehensive research used a sandbox environment to develop and test static and video creations for parameters such as trust and perception, as well as implicit and explicit reactions. The results showed that AI currently is still a tool not a replacement for human creativity, with some effects such as brand and ad awareness as well as brand favorability and purchase intent positively impacted by the use of AI. Generally, users and consumers are comfortable with AI content, but important issues appear to be disclosure and transparency, as people want to know that AI is being used with concerns regarding data privacy and security persisting. Some of the take-aways are that personalization is important and increasingly expected, and attention and engagement increase with GenAI, if it is used to augment assets while disclose AI-usage to build trust and disctinction.