Highlights
- Providing users with a choice of ads does not always lead to increased attention; its effectiveness depends on factors like user familiarity with the ad content and how the choices are presented.
- The researchers identified a “conjecture formation-and-confirmation” cognitive process as key to understanding the ad choice effect, showing that encouraging this process can attract more user attention to online video ads.
- Featuring new, unfamiliar ads and providing relevant information about ad options can enhance user attention and attitude toward online video advertising, offering an alternative to traditional direct-exposure methods.
Online video advertising has rapidly grown into a popular marketing tool. U.S. firms spent about US$74 billion on online video advertising in 2022, and this expenditure is expected to further increase by around 14% in 2023. Moreover, the revenues generated by online video advertising totalled over US$47 billion in 2022, making video advertising the fastest-growing type of online advertising. Among these kinds of advertising, pre-roll video advertising, which appears before the video content that users intend to watch, is especially prevalent on many video platforms such as YouTube and Hulu and was the focus of this study.
Although video advertising is considered vivid and engaging, practitioners are still concerned about its effectiveness. According to Statista (2022), about 23% of online video ads were not viewed by users in the first half of 2021. The lack of user attention renders online video advertising less effective than expected and has become a significant concern for advertisers and online video platforms.
Although ad content is undoubtedly important to the success of an ad campaign, the effect of ad content will not be evident unless the video ad can hold user attention upfront.
Unlike image-based advertising, whose main content can be consumed at a glance, video advertising usually takes longer. Because online users are often quite impatient with task-irrelevant information, they may abandon a video ad even before starting to consume its content. Hence, although ad content is undoubtedly important to the success of an ad campaign, the effect of ad content will not be evident unless the video ad can hold user attention upfront.
To attract user attention to a video ad, researchers and practitioners have also explored different ways to deliver video ads, that is, the ad delivery approach.
Hulu, a notable online video platform, experiments with choice-based advertising through its “ad selector tool,” where users are prompted to select one video ad to watch from several ad options. Each ad option is presented in the form of a thumbnail-sized static image to help users make a choice.
Although prior research has suggested that the provision of choice enhances users’ feeling of being in control and hence their motivation to process the selected options, evidence shows that providing a choice does not always lead to a positive effect. In the online video advertising context, where users generally want to minimize their attention to the ads, users may not appreciate the opportunity to make their own ad choice because the options are not something that they actually want.
The traditional theoretical perspective, namely, having a choice satisfies users’ need for autonomy and offers a sense of being in control, cannot effectively account for the ad choice effect.
In this study, the researchers proposed and tested one cognitive mechanism underlying the ad choice effect on user attention, with a focus on understanding users’ choice-making process. They contend that there is a “conjecture formation-and-confirmation” process in the ad choice context, and factors that influence whether this process happens are expected to moderate the effects of ad choice on user attention.
To test the hypothesized underlying mechanism of the ad choice effect and to offer meaningful managerial insights, the researchers focused on two potential moderators of the ad choice effect: users’ familiarity with the content of ad options and the amount of relevant information provided for the ad options.
Next, they tested the proposed underlying mechanism more directly by showing that preventing conjecture formation in the choice condition weakens the positive ad choice effect, and, in contrast, encouraging conjecture formation in the no choice condition attracts more user attention.
This study examined the effectiveness of incorporating choice in the context of online video advertising and makes several theoretical contributions.
This study examined the effectiveness of incorporating choice in the context of online video advertising and made several theoretical contributions. First, by investigating why and when the provision of choice can attract user attention to online video advertising, this study advances the understanding of the impact of choice when unwanted options (e.g., ads) are presented.
Second, this study investigated two new moderators of ad choice effect on user attention. Ad choice effect can be moderated by whether the ad options are familiar to the users and how the choice options are presented. Ad choice is more likely to increase user attention when users are unfamiliar with the ad options.
This study adopted several measurements of user attention based on users’ page browsing behaviour in the online experiments, users’ eye movements in the laboratory experiments, and users’ ad skipping behaviour in both online and laboratory experiments.
Study findings offer insightful implications to practitioners in terms of how to mitigate users’ ad avoidance and increase their voluntary attention to online video advertising. Although direct exposure has been the de facto standard approach to delivering video ads, the study suggests that advertisers and online video platform managers may want to adopt alternative approaches to delivering video ads, such as choice-based advertising. The researchers also highlight the importance of featuring new ads (i.e., those unfamiliar to users) and providing relevant information about the content of ad options. In addition, given the “conjecture formation” tactic is effective in attracting user attention to pre-roll video ads, practitioners may also apply this tactic when delivering other types of online video ads, such as banner video ads and overlay video ads.
Although the researchers mainly focused on the effect of ad choice for practitioners to attract user attention, they believe that choice-based advertising will also benefit users’ overall ad-viewing experience compared with direct-exposure advertising. Study findings show that choice-based advertising leads to a more positive attitude toward the video ad. More importantly, as choice-based advertising allows practitioners to better understand users’ ad preferences, users can expect to receive more personalized and relevant ads in the future.
Keywords: Online video advertising, Choice, User attention, Conjecture formation and confirmation, Eye tracking
* Learn more from the full research article here:
https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2019.03291
