- February 19, 2026
- By Gregory Muraski
A new predictive tool co-developed at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business can help marketers place digital ads more effectively.
Michel Wedel, PepsiCo Chair in Consumer Science, collaborated with Jianping Ye, a UMD doctoral student in applied mathematics & statistics, and scientific computation, and Rik Pieters of Tilburg University to build the tool, AdGazer. Their findings appear in the Journal of Marketing.
AdGazer evaluates both an advertisement and the media environment around it to forecast how much attention viewers will give. The team tested AdGazer on more than 3,500 digital ads using eye tracking to capture where viewers looked and for how long. The tool significantly outperformed existing models, demonstrating that strategic placement can meaningfully increase attention to both ads and their brands.
Wedel, whose research spans visual marketing and eye tracking, notes that “AdGazer represents an advancement in using AI and machine learning—grounded in behavioral theory—to make digital advertising more effective.”
AdGazer enhances contextual advertising by aligning ads with the surrounding content more intelligently. It does so by:
- Organizing simple and complex features of both ads and their media environments;
- Leveraging a large language model to interpret media topics and match them with the most relevant ads;
- Using predictive models to estimate how long viewers will look at an ad and its brand;
- Applying algorithms that use these predictions to place ads in contexts from which they benefit most.
For managers and advertisers, Wedel emphasized the practical takeaway: “AdGazer helps place ads in the best spots, generating more attention than current methods such as simple text-based matching or native advertising.”