The Daily App: 3M Visual Attention Service

The 3M Visual Attention Service is one of those technologies that can blow your mind if you’ve never seen it before: a service that will look at any picture or graphic and predict where viewers’ eyes will go in the first three seconds they see it.

For visual marketing, that’s the Golden Ticket.

The good news is that the 3M VAS app for the iPhone is free and just an absolute snap to use. We took a photo of the corporate logo board in our lobby and within seconds had a heat map and image map telling us where people would focus first when looking at it. (Tip: Reds tend to do much better at drawing attention than greens.)

The bad news: while the app is free, the service is a little pricey. For $74.99, you can get unlimited visual analyses via the 3M VAS app for one day, $199 for one week or $499 for unlimited VAS analyses for a month. On a per-use basis, it’s $19.99 for one shot, 5 for $74.99 or 10 for $119.99.

If visual marketing and branding is a priority, 3M VAS for iPhone extends the reach and power of the service to wherever you go. To start, 3M gives you 5 free “credits” to try the service out (although it watermarks the results on the trial.) Still, for free, it’s definitely worth a look.