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Each of your watches is covered up to 150% of the insured value (up to the total value of the policy).
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Our quotes are based on historical sales and real-time market data allowing us to give fair prices without all the hassle.
The fastest and most secure way to protect the watches you love.
We’ve minimized the paperwork and maximized protection, so you can stop worrying about your watches and focus on enjoying them.
In most cases, you’ll get a personalized quote in seconds and your policy kicks in immediately.
Wherever you are on planet Earth, your watches are protected. Rest easy and travel safely.
If you suffer a covered loss, there’s no deductible and no gimmicks. Ever.
Each of your watches is covered up to 150% of the insured value (up to the total value of the policy).
SELL OR TRADE
Our quotes are based on historical sales and real-time market data allowing us to give fair prices without all the hassle.
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The fastest and most secure way to protect the watches you love.
We’ve minimized the paperwork and maximized protection, so you can stop worrying about your watches and focus on enjoying them.
In most cases, you’ll get a personalized quote in seconds and your policy kicks in immediately.
Wherever you are on planet Earth, your watches are protected. Rest easy and travel safely.
If you suffer a covered loss, there’s no deductible and no gimmicks. Ever.
Each of your watches is covered up to 150% of the insured value (up to the total value of the policy).
SELL OR TRADE
Our quotes are based on historical sales and real-time market data allowing us to give fair prices without all the hassle.
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One of the most ubiquitous features of wristwatch advertisements – and, for that matter, wristwatch photography in general these days – is the position of the hands. It doesn’t matter if it’s the most humble Swatch or the most elevated Patek. The hands are invariably going to be set to 10:10, or very close to it, and as it turns out, this is something that might actually make you more inclined to buy the watch.
Behind the subliminal message is a phenomenon called pareidolia. The word has Greek roots (all the best words do) and comes from “para” which means roughly, “beside” or “instead of” and “eidolon” which means an image or shape. The word refers to the tendency of the human mind (and, presumably, other minds too) to see meaningful patterns in visual images which may or may not actually be meaningful themselves. A trivial example is looking at clouds until you begin to see anything from faces to farm animals. Another example is the long-standing conviction that telescopes showed networks of canals on the surface of Mars, which seems to be a hotbed of stimuli for pareidolia – the famous Face On Mars is one more recent example.
The “Face On Mars,” upper center, as photographed by the Viking Orbiter, 1976
The same feature, photographed in 2001 by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, 2007
Without pareidolia, emoji wouldn’t work, or at least would not work as well. Take the ? emoji. We interpret it very rapidly and very naturally as a face expressing confusion, or perhaps, mild sadness or disappointment, and the interpretation is so instinctive that it’s very easy to miss just how little the brain has to work with. There’s a circle filled in with a solid color – and, let’s face it, a geometric circle doesn’t have a whole lot in common with the actual shape of a human head; if it did everyone with a compass would be Leonardo da Vinci – two dots, and an asymmetrically curved line, and that’s it.
What happens when you see the emoji – or anything even slightly face-like, for that matter – is that a region of the brain is activated which is specialized for facial recognition. The area rejoices in the name of the fusiform facial area and it’s on the bottom back of the brain (the ventral surface of the temporal lobe, for all you neuroanatomy fans out there). An interesting feature of the FFA is that simple shapes, like emoji, seem to activate it faster than actual faces and the theory goes that evolution favored the development of an ability to rapidly read facial expressions and determine emotions from minimal stimuli.
Rolex Oyster ad, 1927, with watch hands set to 10:17. Image, Rolex.org
So what’s all this got to do with a 10:10 setting for watch hands in watch ads? The plot thickens. Adam Andrew Newman, writing on the subject for The New York Times in 2008 (in the middle of the subprime mortgage crisis, when there was precious little to smile about), noted the ubiquity of the practice, and Ulysse Nardin’s then-head of marketing, Suzanne Hurney, remarked, “It has the aesthetic of the smiley face to be 10 past 10, so we try whenever possible to opt for that.” Pareidolia strikes again. Timex’s president at the time, Adam Gurian told TheTimes that his company always shot watches with the hands set to 10:09:36, even if the position obscured certain features or functions.
As far as I know, however, the cognitive science piece didn’t fall into place until 2017, when Frontiers In Psychology published a study entitled, “Why Is 10 Past 10 the Default Setting for Clocks and Watches in Advertisements? A Psychological Experiment.” The study found that, ” … watches set at 10:10 showed a significant positive effect on the emotion of the observer and the intention to buy. However, watches set at 8:20 did not show any effect on the emotion or the intention to buy. Moreover, watches set at 10:10 induced in women significantly stronger ratings of pleasure than in men.”
The methodology was straightforward. The researchers photographed twenty different watches, with the hands set to 10:10, 11:30, and 8:20, producing sixty pictures. The pictures were then shown to a group of 20 men and 26 women in the first run of the experiment, and 11 men and 12 women in the second run. The experiment found that the 10:10 setting produced the highest pleasure rating of all three settings, and also that it was the only setting interpreted as a smiling face.
Watch images used in the study, matched with the Bradley-Lang Self-Assessment Manikin (Frontiers In Psychology)
For the sake of accuracy, by the way, I have to mention something James Stacey pointed out to me, which is that while we commonly say that hands are set to 10:10, a lot of the time they are actually set to something between 10:08 and 10:10 – if the tip of the minute hand is lying directly on an hour marker it can be harder to see the tip of the minute hand accurately and it may introduce an asymmetry that defeats the smiley-face effect.
The good news for all you free will believers is that while the 10:10 setting reduces the reluctance to buy a watch, it did not – at least, in this rather small-scale study – appear to be strong enough to actually make a person decide to pull the trigger. But in the cutthroat world of analog watch sales you probably take every advantage you can get. The paper says, “This study provides for the first time empirical evidence for the notion that using watches with a time setting resembling a smiling face (like 10:10) can positively affect the emotional response of the observers and their evaluation of a seen watch, even though they are not aware of the fact that the shown time setting is inducing this effect.”
Interestingly enough, the habit of showing watches with hands set to 10:10 didn’t start to become common in watch ads until the 1950s. Time setting in watch ads seems to have been a bit more haphazard in earlier days – a 1927 Rolex ad built around the English Channel swim of Mercedes Gleitz has the hands on the watches set to 10:17, for example. It’s not that no one used a 10:10 setting, but it wasn’t nearly as ubiquitous as it is now. 8:20 seems to have been a popular option despite the fact that it looks a little like a frowning face – maybe when watches were a necessity and not a luxury, it didn’t hurt to give an impression that telling time was a serious business (plus, the hands don’t obscure the brand logo in that position).
Crown-left GMT Master II
And digital watches? I haven’t done anything like an exhaustive study, but guess what – Timex digital watches are set to exactly the same time as their analog watches: 10:09:36. Casio’s G-Shocks have their digital displays set to 10:58:50 across the board and the date displayed is always Sunday, June 30th. On their analog/digital watches the date is still June 30th, but the hands are set to 10:09:36 – take that, Timex.
Why June 30th? I had no idea at first. Obviously, a lot has happened on June 30ths – there have been 440 June 30ths since the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar in 1582, and if nothing else, thanks to the Tunguska Event, it’s National Meteorite Day. But before this story was published, my colleague Myles Kusaba pointed out that June of 1957 was the month and year in which the Casio Computer Company was founded and that June 30th was, that year, on a Sunday. We’re checking in with Casio on this but in the meantime I think we can say, QED.
HODINKEE is an authorized retailer for Timex and G-Shock.
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