An examination of ad clutter and task orientation on avoidance of social media advertising : a psychological reactance perspective

Abstract

While the integration of advertising into users' content feeds (i.e. "Promoted Tweets" or "Sponsored Posts") has proven successful in driving revenue for advertisers, such efforts have started to gather complaints from social media users. As the amount of advertising has grown, social media users have started to experience greater interruption, which might lead to negative psychological consequences such as perceived intrusiveness and ad avoidance. Drawing on the theoretical framework of psychological reactance theory, the current study aimed to empirically examine the effects of ad clutter and task orientation on Twitter users' perceived intrusiveness and avoidance of promoted tweets. A mixed factorial experiment (2 x 2) was conducted online, and the results suggest that users' perceived intrusiveness and avoidance of promoted tweets were significantly influenced by the level of ad clutter in the Twitter feed. Effects of task orientation did not achieve statistical significance. Theoretical contributions to existing Internet ad clutter models and practical implications are discussed based on the findings from the study.