Interactive Ad Avoidance on Mobile Phones

Ad avoidance (e.g., “blinding out” digital ads) is a substantial problem for advertisers. Avoiding mobile banner ads differs from active ad avoidance in nonmobile (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 (i.e., 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). Consequently, we show that the effect of viewing time on recall depends on the position of an ad in interaction with the device. An eye-tracking study and an experiment show that 43% to 46% of embedded mobile banner ads are likely to suffer from ad avoidance, and that ad recall is 6 to 7 percentage points lower on mobile phones (versus desktop).