Programmatic Advertising: A Quantitative Study of Consumer Attitudes Towards Highly Frequent Online Ads

Sammanfattning: Because of the adaptation to technological and social changes, the advertising environment is constantly evolving and today the central part of online advertising is called Programmatic advertising. It’s an automated media buying technique that involves targeting individual consumers in real-time. However, previous research shows that high frequency is one of the most important issues within programmatic advertising and not all ads bought programmatically is in frame of a good frequency. Furthermore, theories indicate that frequency influences consumers’ attitudes towards advertising, which lead to our research question: “How does high frequency exposure affect consumers’ attitudes towards programmatic advertising?” The purpose of this research is therefore to get a deeper understanding of how highly frequent exposure of programmatic advertising affect consumers’ attitudes towards it. We found that Irritation, Invasiveness, Likeability of relevance and Recognition are terms examined in previous studies related to individually targeted advertising or frequently exposed advertising. In order to carry out an explanatory research, we measured these variables including frequency with a quantitative survey and made statistical calculations such as correlation and regression analyses to see if our hypotheses were supported. The analyses indicated average causal relationships between Frequency and Irritation as well as between Frequency and Likeability of relevance whereas the causal relationships between Frequency and the other two variables were weak. We concluded based on our study that highly frequent exposed programmatic advertising is affecting consumer attitudes both positively with relevance, and negatively causing irritation. However, the relevance that comes with programmatic advertising generates a stronger feeling of likeability than of irritation.