Current Issue Summary
June 2023 (Vol. 64, Issue 2)
Disruptive versus Non-Disruptive Advertising in Online Streaming Video Services: How Does Advertisement Placement Affect Consumer Perceptions and Ad Effectiveness?
Consumers may love online video platforms like YouTube, but the inevitable disruption—mid-roll ads that start playing in the middle of a scene, sentence or word—sours the romance. That’s, of course, not great news for advertisers, who should take heed from this article by Katheryn R. Christy, Ranran Mi, Ran Tao and Linqi Lu (all at University of Wisconsin-Madison, except for Mi who is at Kean University in New Jersey). The researchers find that the irritation caused by these ads leads to lower levels of product involvement and brand recognition than that garnered by nondisruptive ads.
The authors compare disruptive ads’ effectiveness with that of nondisruptive ads in user-generated streamed video . They also investigate the impact on people’s perceptions of both the ads and media content, while exploring the outcomes predicated on two types of effects: disruption and spillover. Spillover, as defined in the literature, takes place when a viewer’s attention and engagement with a video are transferred to the ad, increasing engagement with the ad and therefore the ad’s effectiveness. Earlier studies show how this benefits mid-roll ads more than pre-roll ads … “in the traditional commercial break spaces within streamed traditional television content (e.g., Hulu, Paramount+),” in other words when the ads are nondisruptive.
But, as the research team discovers, disruption theory wins out over spillover in terms of predicting irritation and ensuring negative effects of mid-roll ads in nontraditional break spaces. “Although it was hypothesized that an advertisement that was not expected (i.e. disruptive ad) could benefit from the audience’s inability to prepare to disengage with coming advertising, it seems that this was not the case,” the authors write. “Instead, the sudden break in content … seems to have interrupted the hedonic flow experience of watching the video, resulting in irritation and an increased level of disengagement from the advertisement content.” Among the takeaways:
- Disruptive ads produce higher levels of irritation and lower levels of product involvement than nondisruptive ads.
- Mid-roll ads, in general, produce lower brand recognition than pre-roll ads.
- Ads placed within narrative content produce higher levels of irritation than those placed in nonnarrative content.
- The results did not show any impact of ad placement on content or channel perceptions.