Have an eye-tracking breakfast with Prof Michel Wedel

Eye-tracking is used to measure the point of gaze in order to provide scientific market research analyses to evaluate the effectiveness of websites, Internet applications, online shops, multimedia applications, software, advertising campaigns, TV, packaging and brands.

Wedel's presentation will specifically help advertisers and agencies improve their campaign performance and assess the effectiveness of their marketing activities. Developing an effective and measurable communications is not easy. But it can be done. And in these touch economic times it is more important than ever to eliminate risk and extract everything you can from the marketing budget.

Wedel is the Pepsico Professor of Consumer Research at the Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, and holds an honorary chair at the University of Groningen. He has a MSc in bio-mathematics from the University of Leiden (1981), an MSc in statistics from the Netherlands Statistical Society (1986), and a PhD in Marketing from Wageningen University in the Netherlands (1990).

Third-ranked in the world

He is currently the third-ranked marketing professor in the world by the US Journal of Marketing. Among his many accolades he was named the best in scholar in Economics and Business in the Netherlands in 2006. His work has won several awards, and in 2008 he was presented with the Gilbert Churchill award for lifetime achievement in the academic study of marketing research by the American Research Association.

Wedel has taught a variety of courses for BBA, MBA and PhD students on marketing research, marketing analysis and marketing decision making. His main research interests are in the application of statistical and econometric methods to problems in marketing and marketing research. Much of his work over the last 15 years addresses issues in visual marketing, using eye-tracking technology.

From 1982 - 1991 he was employed at the TNO Nutrition Research Institute in Zeist (Netherlands ), as head of a statistics and computing group. From 1991 - 2002 he was professor of marketing research at the Department of Marketing, Faculty of Economics, University of Groningen. He was the Dwight F Benton Professor of Marketing at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan (US), 2002 - 2006. He has consulted for a host of profit and nonprofit companies in consumer package goods, finance and banking, automotive, marketing research, telecommunications, and advertising.

His breakfast briefing to the South African marketing, advertising and research industries will take place on 22 May at Michelangelo Hotel in Johannesburg.

For more information, contact Lindiwe Matlali of Prompt Research Insights on email , tel +27 (0)11 575 6853 or fax +27 (0)86 666 1469.