Transcript
A (0:00)
Nerd Alert. Learning is important, right?
B (0:02)
Yes, exactly. But a bunch of nerds.
A (0:04)
Nerd alert. That's right.
B (0:06)
Marketing Architects. Hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions. I'm Linda Jasper on the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I'm joined by my co host, Rob demars, the chief product architect of misfits and machines.
A (0:22)
Howdy. Howdy.
B (0:23)
Hello. We're back with your weekly Nerd Alert. Every week, I'll take a deep dive into academic marketing research and translate its complex ideas into simple, understandable language for Rob, and of course, for all of you. Are you ready to nerd out, Rob?
A (0:35)
This is the exact moment in the podcast where the cool kids leave and it's just us spreadsheet lovers in the corner eating paste. Let's do it.
B (0:44)
All right, let's get into it. As always, we'll link the research we cover in the episode notes. This week, I read a paper titled the Impact of Ad Overload, Perception in Social Media on Ad Avoidance Behavior, the Mediating Effect of Social Media Fatigue, and Goal Impediment. It's from a team of marketing researchers at the Northern Border University in Saudi Arabia. And this paper tries to answer a simple question. What actually happens when people feel like there are too many ads on social media? And most importantly, why does that lead them to kind of tune out? Ad overload doesn't just annoy people. It actually triggers deeper reactions that work together to kill engagement. So they get in the way of what people are trying to do. They make them fatigued. So if you combine these, ad avoidance becomes a real issue. So, Rob, before we get too far, when you're scrolling through social, how aware are you of the ads?
A (1:35)
I'm extremely aware. I mean, I think social media has become a wasteland of basically anything goes ads where, you know, outrageous product claims are just thrown in your face. I mean, don't you think ags must wake up every morning and just start zoom scrolling so they can see who they're going to sue today? I mean, it's just. There's just so much crazy stuff coming at you. So, yeah, I definitely think it's hard to ignore it. Quite honestly.
B (2:03)
I feel the same way. I think that I'm very aware of it when I'm on on social media and you're seeing different ads. So this study, they ground their work in two theories that relate to kind of how the two of us are feeling when we're on social media. The first is called reactance theory. This Says people don't like feeling controlled. When ads interrupt what we're doing, whether it's reading a post, watching videos, or connecting with friends, we experience psychological reactance. So basically we say, you're blocking my goal, so now I'm resisting you. And I bet, Rob, if you think about when you're on social, you're probably feeling that a little bit. Like, when ads, like, really get in your way, it starts to feel sort of annoying. And the second theory is cognitive load theory. Our brains can only process so much information at once. When feeds are packed with content and ads, we hit overload. That overload turns into fatigue, and fatigue turns into avoidance. So how did they test these different theories? They surveyed 450 social media users across YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok. Participants were mostly between 18 and 35 years old, as those tended to be the heaviest social media users. And they measured five key variables. The first was perceived ad clutter. Then perceived ad intrusiveness, perceived goal impediment, social media fatigue, and finally, ad avoidance behavior. Then they use structural equation modeling to see how all those pieces fit together. If you're like me, you do not know what that means. So I looked it up. It's a way to test a whole system of relationships at once so they can look at how multiple factors influence each other directly and indirectly. So basically, to summarize, instead of looking at a cause and effect, they're looking at more of a full chain of what drives outcomes. And what they found was, as ad clutter increased, people felt more blocked from accomplishing what they came to do. The same clutter also makes the platform itself feel more exhausting to use. And then fatigue turned out to be the strongest driver of ad avoidance in the entire model. One nuance here is that goal impediment by itself didn't directly cause ad avoidance. Instead, it worked through fatigue. So ads get in the way, we feel worn out, and then we begin actively avoiding the ads. So, Rob, does that sound like how you feel when you use social media? Like, is it the specific ad that bothers you, or do you find the whole experience becomes a bit draining?