Abstract
Advertisers want to get consumers to love the advertised products, but they often try to do this by annoying them with unwelcome and disruptive advertising. This creates a possible contradiction between the negative feelings elicited by the advertising and the positive feelings the consumers are supposed to develop towards the advertised products. One may assume that the negative feelings towards annoying advertising are transferred to the advertised brands. This assumption was tested in a series of five experiments. Participants were disrupted by annoying pop-up ads while playing a popular computer game. In a two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) test, participants were required to choose between advertised and new brands. The advertised brands were preferred over the new brands, even though the ads were perceived as annoying. The positive effects of disruptive advertising can be attributed to the enhanced fluency of advertised brands. These findings demonstrate that disruptive advertising can be effective in increasing brand preferences, which may help to explain the widespread use of this type of advertising in practice. However, before recommending the use of disruptive advertising, it should be taken into consideration that it may also have undesirable side effects such as increasing advertising avoidance.
Introduction
Advertisers want to get consumers to love products, but they often try to do this by annoying them with unwelcome and disruptive advertising. This creates a possible contradiction between the negative feelings elicited by the advertising and the positive feelings the consumers are supposed to develop towards the advertised products. To illustrate, we asked 24 students in a course on Consumer Psychology to rate the degree to which they perceived the ads they encounter every day as annoying. Nearly half of the students (45%) reported that they found ads “almost always” annoying, and half of the students (50%) reported that they found ads “sometimes” annoying. Upon inquiry, the one person who stated that she was “almost never” annoyed by ads admitted that she had installed an ad blocker on her computer, and that she did not watch television at all, which suggests that she was probably just very good at avoiding ads altogether. This is of course only anecdotal evidence, but the negative view of advertising is also reflected in large-scale surveys on this issue (Cho and Cheon 2004; Edwards, Li, and Lee 2002).
General Discussion
The experiments of the present series show a highly consistent pattern of results. (1) The results confirm the negative evaluation of disruptive advertising via pop-up ads that is also reflected in large-scale surveys on this issue (Cho and Cheon 2004; Edwards, Li, and Lee 2002). In all experiments, the pop-up ads were rated as annoying. (2) In most experiments, ad annoyance was negatively correlated with the participants' ratings of how much they liked playing the Tetris game, suggesting that the annoyance caused by the disruption of the game may have interfered with the enjoyment of the primary task. (3) Most importantly, the present study served to test the question of whether the disruptive and annoying presentation of the pop-up ads during the Tetris game would subsequently lead to positive or negative advertising effects. Experiment 1 shows that the brands that were advertised via pop-up ads were well remembered, which suggests that disruptive advertising can increase brand recognition. This finding is to be expected given that the pop-up ads blocked the view on the game and required participants to interact with the ads, which resulted in the processing of the ad, and, thereby, of the brand name. An even more interesting finding is that disruptive advertising has a beneficial effect on brand preferences when participants are required to choose between advertised and non-advertised brands.
