Ad avoidance (eg. “blinding out” digital ads) is a substantial problem for advertisers. Avoiding mobile banner ads differs from active ad avoidance in non-mobile (desktop) settings, because mobile phone users interact with ads to avoid them: (1) They classify new content at the bottom of their screens; if they see an ad, they (2) scroll so that it is out of the locus of attention and (3) position it at a peripheral location at the top of the screen while focusing their attention on the (non-ad) content in the screen center.
Introducing viewport logging to marketing research, we capture granular ad-viewing patterns from users’ screens (ie. viewports).
While mobile users’ ad-viewing patterns are concave over the viewport (with more time at the periphery than in the screen center), viewing patterns on desktop computers are convex (most time in the screen center).
An eye-tracking study and an experiment show that:
43–46% of embedded mobile banner ads are likely to suffer from ad avoidance, and that ad recall is 6–7 percentage points lower on mobile phones (versus desktop).
Consequently, we show that the effect of viewing time on recall depends on the position of an ad in interaction with the device.
…General Discussion: Through an eye-tracking study on mobile phones and an experiment that compared ad avoidance across devices (mobile versus desktop), our research shows that mobile users interact with websites to avoid seeing ads in a 3-step pattern (interactive ad avoidance): They (1) classify new content that emerges at the bottom of the screen, then (2) actively scroll the ad to position it (3) at a peripheral location at the top of the screen and focus on the actual website content at the center (eg. the news).
Between 46% (Study 1) and 43% (Study 2, mobile) of the advertisements shown were actively avoided following a concave pattern (ie. time spent in the peripheral was 40% higher than time spent in the central 60%) and 30–41% of participants showed such interactive ad avoidance behavior on mobile phones in most cases. This pattern deviates from active ad avoidance on desktop devices, where ad viewability peaks at the center of the screen. Mobile ad viewing time is 66% shorter, and recall is 6–7 percentage points lower. Despite interactive ad avoidance on mobile phones, the time an ad is viewable on display still explains ad recall—contingent on its display location.
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