Red Herring, 1080076X, 1/21/2008.

Moresco, Justin.

This short article reports some of the key findings of a survey conducted to investigate internet users' attitudes and behaviors related to in-stream video ads--video advertisements which proceed, interrupt, or precede normal video content.  The findings show an extreme dissatisfaction with in-stream video ads which has led to a portion abandoning the websites they were using when such ads were introduced.  Some light is shed on why ads elicited such a strong reaction; viewers of video content like TV shows may expect and be reconciled to commercials on traditional mediums like television, but they do not expect ads in their online content, and are perhaps unpleasantly surprised by their intrusion.  In order to increase effectiveness of in-stream video ads, the author recommends making ad content more relevant to the video content being viewed and decreasing the length of ads.  This latter recommendation makes particular sense for a number of reasons.  Consumers generally prefer minimally intrusive ads to longer ones.  The also seem particularly disgusted with internet video advertising when compared with television ads, and are thus less likely to sit through television-length ads on the internet.  The article also describes some creative ad placement which may minimize consumer irritation by blocking less of the video screen.

This report is interesting from a number of perspectives.  First, it provides some support for the social contract view of advertising by noting that consumers seem less likely to accept video ads on the internet than on television, despite similarities in their use.  While television viewers utilize many different strategies to minimize their exposure to ads, from channel surfing to DVR, there seems to be less hostility toward the ads themselves than on the internet.  This may be because internet users have not yet adopted a contract in which their attention to ads seems a fair exchange for content.  The article is also interesting because it highlights another type of advertising--in-stream video--which appears to affect consumers' attitudes, in this case negatively.  It also reiterates the findings of Wise et al. that ad relevancy to content likely increases positive attitudes toward the ad and broadens the context of the finding from advergames to in-stream videos, a less unique type of advertising.

*Because this was not an academic study, I was not able to access the actual study results, only this article.

International Marketing Review,
Vol. 14 No. 5, 1997, pp. 362-375.

Mary Ellen Gordon and Kathryn De Lima-Turner.

This study is an early look at consumer attitudes towards internet advertising through the lens of social contracts.  It draws off of previous works which utilize a social contract framework in analyzing direct mail marketing, to impose a similar framework over internet advertising.  In this implicit contract, consumers give attention, private information, and other useful commodities to advertisers in exchange for internet content and access.  Within this framework, Gordon and De Lima-Turner examine specifically the trade-offs consumers make among advertising attributes, such as ad placement, message, and their own level of control.  The authors conducted an internet survey to examine which of five attributes--who controls access to ads, placement, message, influence on fees, and how private information is collected--are most important to consumers.

While this survey may seem rather limited in relevance to the topic of current consumer attitudes toward internet advertising because it was not published recently and because the sample of consumers was skewed (overly educated and overly male), the main findings have been borne out by history and other studies.  Somewhat surprisingly to the authors, they found that internet consumers are considerably lazier than expected.  When summarizing their results, they say, "The majority of Internet users, at least in our sample, seem to take quite a passive approach to the tradeoffs within the social contract. It is as though they view advertising as a fact of life. They hope it is as entertaining and as well targeted as possible, but they certainly do not want to exert any effort in ensuring this."  These findings concur with later studies which describe consumers' low attention to and lack of engagement with internet ads.  The authors were also surprised to find that consumers were comfortable with their usage being monitored for the sake of advertising.  This could be supported by the popularity of Google, Gmail, and other similar services which provide targeted ads in exchange for personal information.

Beyond providing findings about what influences attitudes toward advertising, the article also provide a framework for understanding why factors in this study and others matter.  Environments in which ttitudes toward advertising are positive, or at least neutral, could be examples of successful social contracts between advertisers and consumers, while situations in which consumers feel negatively toward advertisements could be the result of social contracts still being negotiated or contracts which once were accepted but have failed as changes occurred.