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1. Introduction
Digital video advertising has increased by 114 per cent since 2014 (Interactive Advertising Bureau, 2018). Prompted by initiatives by Facebook and Google, online advertising expenditure will rise from US$45bn in 2019 to US$61bn by 2021, an average increase of 18 per cent a year (Zenith, 2019). By 2017, television had lost its leading position in terms of ad spending, as online advertising overtook it to become the dominant advertising medium (Slefo, 2017). Yet advertisers tend still to apply their established, offline advertising practices to online settings (Belanche et al., 2017a), without considering the interactive needs of internet audiences (Cho and Cheon, 2004; Gvili and Levy, 2018). “Advertising blindness” spreads quickly when viewers refuse to pay attention to ads or anything that appears to resemble them (Resnick and Albert, 2014). For example, most campaigns persist with an overload strategy, such that US viewers are exposed to some 4,000–10,000 ads daily, but 68 per cent of them recall less than five of the ads they watched in the previous week (Elkin, 2016). In Europe, 75 per cent of viewers admitted they could not remember the brand advertised after being forced to watch an online video ad (Freier, 2019). This evidence suggests that users are now more selective about which advertising messages they accept and might even be reacting negatively to online advertising.
To increase ad effectiveness, some internet platforms have developed innovative, interactive features (e.g. for liking, sharing), led mainly by Facebook and YouTube. The skippable, pre-roll video ad format introduced by YouTube in 2010 is a basic but prototypical example that permits viewers to skip an ad after 5 s (Belanche et al., 2017a). This format has become highly popular, gradually replacing other types of online video advertising (Pashkevich et al., 2012); skippable pre-roll ads now represent approximately 85 per cent of video ads on YouTube (Liyakasa, 2015). Recent literature has examined some aspects of this format, users’ preferences for skippable ads (Pashkevich et al., 2012), personal and situational variables that influence skipping behaviour (e.g. ad repetition, Belanche et al., 2017b), and ad clutter (Ha, 2017). A few studies have also considered ad length and content (e.g. use of humour, Campbell et al., 2017) and different arousal stimuli (Belanche