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Summary
Many advertisers have believed that as much as one-third of the audience switches stations or turns off the radio during advertising breaks—behavior known as mechanical advertising avoidance. A forthcoming study in the Journal of Advertising Research, available now online, provides a new benchmark of three percent—about one-tenth of current estimates. The five-member research team at Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science found that, “Overall, radio has a low level of mechanical advertising avoidance,” which suggests that “previous estimates of 22 percent to 32 percent were misleading (Generali et al., 2011).” According to the researchers, the new numbers reinforce that radio is, indeed, a sound investment.
