Right now, visual commerce is in a perfect storm that most brands are still underestimating.
What brand teams actually need now are AI superpowers that help them assess the quality of the visual content their agencies are creating for commerce – at scale, at speed, and in a way that reflects how real shoppers actually see, scan, and decide.
Drawing on my Unilever training, there is a simple lens for understanding the quality of visual content that maps neatly to both eye tracking and Rhino:
Think of this as a hierarchy: if you don’t earn Attention, Branding and Communication never get a chance. If Branding is weak, performance is hard to attribute. And if Communication fails, the shopper never decodes what the product is, which version it is, or how much they are buying.
A – Attention: winning the biological battle in 0–2 seconds
Eye tracking consistently shows that people do not “read” ecommerce pages; they scan them. Shoppers skip product titles, skim or ignore bullets, and almost never glance at the long description. Attention is a biological reflex before it is a conscious decision.
DragonFly AI’s “design for the biological brain” is exactly right here: content has to win the biological battle for attention in the first 0–2 seconds. In practical terms, that means:
So yes, content needs to get noticed – but within the rules. If retailers didn’t enforce constraints and GS1 principles, the digital shelf would look like Lazada on a bad day. Every supplier shouting in neon, every pixel weaponised, and shopper eyeballs metaphorically bleeding from visual overload.
Eye tracking is the sanity check here. It shows which elements are actually pulling first fixation and early gaze, and which are just adding clutter. Tools like DragonFly, Vizit and Tobii’s own shopper research work together to make that “biological battle” visible and measurable.
B – Branding: more than “is there a logo?”
Once you’ve earned attention, the next job is that the content is recognisably yours at a glance.
Branding in this context is not “does a logo appear in the corner?” It’s the full set of distinctive brand assets and how consistently they appear:
CreativeX has made a science out of measuring this at scale: detecting logos and pack shots, checking whether they meet minimum size/visibility thresholds, and ensuring they appear early and consistently across thousands of assets. That ensures the media money you spend is actually credited back to your brand, not just “some ad that looked nice”.
From a shopper’s perspective, good branding on a hero image means:
From an attention point of view, eye tracking then answers: do people actually look at the brand assets when they scan, and how quickly? Strong branding plus strong attention equals memorability.
C – Communication: the missing link RHINO was built to solve
Attention and Branding are necessary but not sufficient. There’s a third step: Communication – the glance readability of the critical text on the image.
This is where RHINO is different and complementary to CreativeX (for branding) and DragonFly/Vizit/Tobii (for attention). RHINO measures something new: whether critical on-image text will actually be legible on real mobile screens, and does it at scale.
Eyetracking with Tobii has already established a simple but uncomfortable truth: shoppers are not reading product titles. Even when they fixate the title area briefly, they rarely parse it word by word. So the question becomes: if titles are effectively ignored, where does the product understanding come from?
Best practice from inclusive design and visual cognition says the maximum useful message load on any one image is around four key messages – 4+1 at the very most. If you have 10–14 micro-messages sprayed onto the pack, eye tracking shows gaze bouncing around, comprehension dropping, and purchase intent falling away.
That’s why RHINO focuses on glance readability: explicitly testing whether those critical few messages that should carry the load can actually be read at a glance on a small screen.
Recognising that shoppers won’t read titles, 31 CPGs working with GS1 agreed that a mobile hero image must communicate four critical things – the “4Ws” – from the image itself:
If a shopper can’t answer those four questions in a couple of seconds from the hero image alone, the experience is broken. They either slow down (and maybe give up), mis-buy, or abandon the purchase entirely.
The practical problem: most hero images are designed on 24–27 inch screens by young, visually sharp designers and brand managers. Eyeballing an image full-screen in Figma or Photoshop and saying “looks fine to me” is a completely different reality from a 90 px thumbnail on a mid-range Android device in bright daylight. That gap is exactly where RHINO operates.
RHINO was built with Cambridge University’s Inclusive Design team and colour scientist Andrew Somers APCA algorithm to automate two previously manual checks:
Under the hood, RHINO uses:
The output is simple: for each image, you see which words pass, which fail, and where they become marginal – with visual overlays that make issues instantly obvious.
RHINO translates inclusive design theory into commercially relevant outcomes.
From the shopper’s point of view, RHINO helps to:
From the brand’s point of view, RHINO delivers:
This is where RHINO complements tools like CreativeX, DragonFly Ai and Vizit AI rather than competing with them:
Together, they give you a full-stack view of creative quality: Attention, Branding, Communication – measured, not guessed.
The uncomfortable truth is that most digital visuals today are still being designed for the wrong person in the wrong context: a young designer on a big screen with perfect eyesight and plenty of time. The real shopper is older than we think, more distracted than we like, and scrolling far faster than our traditional creative reviews assume.
If your visuals can’t win attention in the first couple of seconds, if your brand isn’t clearly present when they do, and if your critical messages can’t be read at a glance on a 20 mm thumbnail, the rest of your marketing plan is built on sand.
Mobile-first today means vision-first: designing for real eyes, on real devices, in real-world lighting, with real cognitive load limits.
That’s why RHINO exists. It turns glance readability from a subjective argument into an objective, testable standard – so brand teams can ship fewer, better, clearer images that help shoppers decide quickly and confidently, instead of leaving them to squint, guess, and give up.