Resumen de Understanding new online video advertising: the role of arousal and skippability on ad effectiveness
Advertising effectiveness in traditional media, such as television, radio, and newspapers, has dramatically reduced in recent years. Only online media, whose use is increasing daily, is receiving growing investment. Within this environment, skippable and non-skippable online video advertising has become very popular in a short period of time. Interestingly, online media provides professionals with a new opportunity to reverse the negative perception of advertising and consider the viewer as the main character within the advertising process.
This research aims to understand these new advertising formats in more depth. Specifically, this work studies how advertising designs need to be adapted to online formats in order to increase advertisements’ effectiveness. This thesis focuses on the introduction and temporal placement of arousing stimuli, as well as relevant situational (i.e., context congruence) and personal (i.e., product involvement) variables as main determinants of effectiveness, which is measured through ad acceptance, ad attitude, brand attitude, intrusiveness, and brand recall. In addition, this thesis focuses on the best temporal placement of the brand name in relation to arousal. This work combines several research methods (i.e., consumer neuroscience approaches, field, and lab studies) and measures (i.e., objective, self-reported) to obtain a more complete understanding of consumer behavior.
Given the advantages of assessing arousal by means of consumer neuroscience methods (e.g., accuracy), a pretest is used to identify video sequences that induce in users to perceive a significant difference between high- and low-arousal peaks. These video sequences are used to design video ads employed as high- and low-arousal stimuli in five subsequent studies. The results from Studies 1 (lab study) and 2 (field study using Google AdWords) offer some interesting conclusions. In a non-skippable context, a high-arousal-ending design is most effective for brand communication purposes. Nevertheless, a high-arousal-start design is more likeable and accepted (longer ad viewing time in a skippable context) compared to high-arousal-ending and low-arousal ads. Study 3 introduces context congruence as a variable that directly influences advertising effectiveness, and moderates the effect of arousal. The results reveal that high-arousal ads are particularly effective in congruent contexts, but can damage ad effectiveness (e.g., through higher perceived ad intrusiveness) when presented in incongruent contexts. Study 4 proposes a direct effect of product involvement on ad effectiveness and a moderating role on the arousal influence. The findings show that product involvement has a positive direct influence on ad effectiveness. Providing marginal support for the moderation effect, high-arousal ads are found to be less intrusive for users who are less involved with the product, whereas low-arousal ads reduce intrusiveness for highly involved users. To conclude, Study 5 posits that in non-skippable formats, placing the brand name in a post-arousal position increases ad effectiveness; in turn, in skippable formats, showing the brand name in a pre-arousal position increases brand recall and provides better investment performance.
In conclusion, professionals should design different video ads that are adapted to skippable versus non-skippable formats, paying attention to arousal and brand name placement in the design, as well as to the ad’s congruence with the context and the users’ levels of product involvement.
