You might think the contrast in this advert is blindingly "obviously poor". Yet
By Oliver Bradley · November 4, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
You might think the contrast in this advert is blindingly "obviously poor".
Yet brand teams and agencies are regularly afflicted by "problem blindness".
Popularised by author Dan Heath, "problem blindness" is the belief that a negative outcome is natural, inevitable, or someone else's fault, so we fail to even perceive it as a problem to solve.
When you already know what the copy says, your brain fills in the blanks.
You literally cannot understand why a shopper scrolling on a mobile cannot read it.
You cannot eyeball test your own creative for readability because you know what it says!
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Problem blindness rarely announces itself.
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Instead, it dresses up in tailored slacks like this lady in the Ferragamo advert, hiding behind creative defence code words like "aesthetic minimalism".
Which translated means:
"Because we think it looks beautiful on our screen, it doesn't need to be readable to human shoppers."
Digital adverts are routinely engineered by 28-year-old designers with fighter-pilot vision sitting in in front of colour-calibrated 32-inch 4K monitors.
Real shoppers look at screens
on the move,
with glare,
dim brightness,
with tired eyes
and not even their full attention.
Treating visual accessibility as a polite charity tick box for a tiny minority misses my point.
Readability reduces friction and lessens cognitive load for EVERYONE.
If your advert text cannot be glance-read in under a second,
you are paying full media rates to deliver zero message.
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Unreadable is Unbuyable.
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Test your adverts for APCA contrast and Cambridge University glance-readability before you sign off the media spend. RHINO AI by Neem is built to do exactly that.
Do you test your ads' contrast, or do you rely on aesthetic confidence?
(I thought it might be an ad for the chair, as I failed to read the brand name 😆 Ferragamo make bags, not chairs)
#Ecommerce #DigitalMarketing #GlanceReadability #Accessibility #CreativeOptimization #RHINOAI #Advertising