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How does interactivity of online media hamper ad effectiveness

The development of the Internet has increasingly led to advertisements presented on rich and interactive websites offering users a high level of control over the contents they are exposed to—sometimes to the extent of allowing them to skip “unwanted” ads preceding the desired content. While previous studies have shown that such interactivity and control can positively impact users’ subjective experience and attitude toward the advertisements, the present study examined their impact on users’ attention to the ad (using eye-tracking) and actual ad effectiveness (ad memory). It relied on an experimental design allowing for comparing the effectiveness of similar ads that were presented by realistic interfaces simulating common types of online media (in addition to “traditional television” as a form of passive baseline comparison condition). The interfaces consisted of a news website (including many stimuli surrounding the ads and an “ad countdown timer,” that might detract users’ attention from the ads) and YouTube (also including the “skip ad” option). Ad memory correlated positively (negatively) with gaze direction to the ad area (outside the ad area) and was particularly low when users had the opportunity to stop the ad after a few seconds. These results emphasize the scale of ad effectiveness decrease that may occur when the media interfaces offer users easy ways of avoiding video ads by gazing toward surrounding stimuli and by skipping the ads. The implications of these findings for advertisers are addressed, and it is suggested that future studies on the topic should include other measures of ad effectiveness and other distracting factors that might further detract users from online ad video content in real-life contexts.