The causes and effects of native advertising clutter in social media

Sammanfattning: Advertising clutter has long been a thorn in the sides of marketers. Amidst the overwhelming amount of advertising messages that consumers are exposed to every day, they struggle to make their own communication efforts stand out. Previous research has examined the effects and causes of clutter in more traditional settings, coming to the findings that clutter can have significant both affective and cognitive effects on consumers, and that clutter itself is attributable to three components; quantity, intrusiveness and competitiveness of advertisements. Looking at unfamiliar brands and focusing on the non-competitive aspect of ad clutter (quantity and intrusiveness), this study investigates similar such relationships but pertaining specifically to native advertising clutter and within social media. This was a quantitative, survey-based study with N = 152 participants. The media vehicle under investigation was Instagram. The stimuli consisted of 4 different "feeds" where the experimental manipulation was the quantity of in-feed ads. The key concept around which we centred our theoretical framework and findings was perceived clutter, a subjective interpretation of clutter. The other parameters investigated were attitude towards ads, attitude to brands, attitude to media vehicle, ad avoidance, brand recall, ad skepticism, and ad relevance. Findings confirm how intrusiveness and quantity of ads dictate perceptions of clutter even for native ads. They further imply that perceived clutter broadly affects consumer perceptions and behaviours, and that the intrusiveness component of clutter in turn could be lowered by more relevant advertising. This has significant implications for marketers and social media platforms alike and suggests that exceptional targeting may help unfamiliar brands overcome the daunting effects of clutter.