2.5.7: Customer Avoidance of Advertising on Social Media

Message stream advertising, advertisements that appear as part of a user’s social media feed, has emerged as an important tool for marketing for businesses. This type of advertising is popular because it is often seen along with user-generated content (Campbell and Marks 2015). However, message stream advertising has the potential for consumer avoidance;, that is, the advertisement is ignored or scrolled past by the user. This is often due to skepticism about the advertisement, the intrusiveness of the advertisement on the individual’s social media feed, anger about being interrupted in their social media feed, and the perceived clutter of the advertisements invading their social media feed (Tran 2017; Youn and Kim 2019; Fan et al. 2017).

Ad avoidance is defined as any action that a user may take to avoid or lessen exposure to an ad on a social media feed, such as scrolling past the unwanted ad, closing or skipping advertisement pages when possible, or by taking actions to consciously ignore the advertisement when it is encountered (Li et al. 2025). Using a conceptual framework that was developed by the authors of the study, a series of hypotheses were set and tested empirically using data gathered from the study. For example, the first hypothesis posed by the researchers is that the intrusiveness of the advertising has a positive effect on consumer’s negative emotions. In other words, the researchers hypothesize that consumers will react negatively when they notice the advertising intruding on their social feed. A similar hypothesis is that ad intrusiveness has a negative effect on the consumer’s perceived entertainment. Several other hypotheses were formulated for the research project that are too numerous to consider here. Within the scientific method we can assume that these hypotheses were developed based on previous observations. These hypotheses were then tested using new observations from the study.

After forming the research hypotheses, the researchers interviewed 438 users of a popular social media application where measures of both advertising intrusiveness and negative emotions for twenty example items that were presented to the participants. Using a statistical modeling technique the researchers were able to show that advertising intrusiveness is linked to negative emotions and advertising avoidance. The negative emotions included irritation, frustration, discouragement, and anger. Moreover, the study showed that users are more likely to increase their sense of control by discontinuing the advertisement when experiencing these negative emotions.

These results demonstrate the next phase of the scientific method, which is observation. These observations can now be used to form new theories and hypotheses about the behavior of users on social media and their reactions to intrusive advertising. The results may be used to change advertising methodology, thus creating new hypotheses about the effect of using these new methods, and the cycle begins anew.