When time runs out, what do they let go? Time pressure, ad type, and psychological resilience in ad avoidance

In today's digital landscape saturated with fragmented and intrusive advertising, ad avoidance is increasingly common—intensified by consumers' growing sense of time pressure. Yet, the complex antecedents of this behavior remain underexplored. Grounded in information encountering theory, this study investigates how time pressure and ad type jointly shape ad avoidance across four experiments. A secondary dataset of 1877 real-world ads revealed a significant interaction between time pressure and ad type. This effect was consistently replicated in three controlled online experiments involving 1480 participants (all p < 0.001), which further identified justification difficulty and psychological reactance as mediators, and psychological resilience as a boundary condition—providing robust causal evidence. Key findings show that interest-related ads are more likely to be avoided under high time pressure due to justification difficulty (B = 0.21, 95 % CI = [0.08, 0.36]), while problem-related ads elicit greater avoidance under low time pressure due to psychological reactance (B = −0.19, 95 % CI = [−0.30, −0.08]). Notably, the interaction is more pronounced among consumers with low psychological resilience and diminishes among those with high resilience. These results advance understanding of ad avoidance while offering actionable insights for optimizing digital advertising in attention-scarce environments. • High time pressure leads to greater avoidance of interest-related advertisements. • Low time pressure increases avoidance of problem-related advertisements. • Justification difficulty mediates avoidance under high time pressure. • Psychological reactance mediates avoidance under low time pressure. • Psychological resilience buffers the interactive effect of time pressure and ad type.