FIVE-SECOND PERSUASION: THE EFFECT OF SKIP FUNCTION IN PRE-ROLL ADVERTISING

Abstract

The current study adopts two different studies with the same experimental stimuli but different levels of analysis. Study 1 would be a sort of theoretical evidence for Study 2. The purpose of Study 1 is to investigate the effects of the skip function in pre-roll advertising on (1) viewers’ ad attention, (2) ad content recall, and (3) psychological responses to and attitudes toward the ad. Based on the assumptions of psychological reactance theory (Brehm, 1966), this study predicted that free-online-video users would have more positive psychological responses and more favorable attitude toward the skippable pre-roll ad, which gives the opportunity to avoid the forcefully exposed ad by skipping it (i.e., to restore threatened freedom), than the unskippable pre-roll ad. However, although attitudes toward the pre-roll ad did not significantly differ in both the skippable and unskippable situation, Study 1 showed that viewers were likely to feel less intrusiveness, irritation, and threatened freedom about the unskippable pre-roll ad than the skippable one. While Study 1 focuses on the comparison between two different formats of pre-roll advertising, the skippable and nonskippable ad, in terms of attention, recall, other psychological responses (i.e., perceived threatened freedom, perceived intrusiveness, and perceived irritation), Study 2 centers on the effect of dispersed attention on attitudes within each format of pre-roll advertising, thus modeling the process of psychological reactance. Study 2 found a negative association between psychological reactance and attitude, one of the most representative predictors for ad effectiveness.