Visual attention and retention effects of a design element in culturally targeted messages: introducing the virtual billboard paradigm

Cultural targeting involves designing messages to align with surface or deep-cultural elements with the goal of enhancing message relevance and impact. Methodological challenges remain in experimentally manipulating messages that are congruent with the cultural characteristics of receivers while measuring effects and balancing experimental control and realism; as such, we know very little about mechanisms that explain cultural targeting effects. The current study focuses on the effects of matching messages to self-reported racial identity as a design element of culturally targeted messages. The study used a novel virtual reality-based paradigm in which participants drove along a virtual highway with billboards that portrayed people who either matched or mismatched their racial identity. Using eye-tracking, we observed that participants paid more attention to culturally matched billboards, both in frequency and duration. Results also indicated better recall for matched billboards, suggesting more effective message encoding and storage. This underscores the potential of cultural targeting for health communication and other messaging contexts. More broadly, this study points to new ways for studying communication processes and outcomes with the aid of virtual reality manipulations and biobehavioral measures.