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Ad avoidance reaches alarming 70 per cent, says Lintas study

Intellect, a division of the Lintas Media Group, has released an elaborate study on ad avoidance conducted in association with Hansa Research

Intellect, a Lintas Media Group division, has unveiled a media engagement and ad avoidance study titled Engross along with Hansa Research. This is the third such study conducted by the Lintas Media Group since 2002.

This time around, the focus is on two parameters: content, which attracts and drives engagement, and ambient design, which distracts and generates avoidance. The research exercise was conducted in both urban and rural areas. The urban areas covered a sample size of 1,073, SEC A, age group 15-40, Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai and Hyderabad, while the rural area covered a sample size of 892, within the 15-40 years’ age group, in Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh.

The study covers points such as the extent of advertising avoidance across genres, media and audiences; the reason for avoidance; the degree of engagement with types of genres by different target groups; the relationship between engagement and ad avoidance, and the development of an engagement score for planning.

The study revealed that ad avoidance has increased across all media in the last two years, especially in newspapers, radio and the Internet. In fact, the avoidance is much more rampant in the rural areas. Overall, ad avoidance has crossed the 70 per cent mark across all media, the study reveals.

Ad avoidance reaches alarming 70 per cent, says Lintas study
Lynn de Souza
The study throws open other interesting findings, too. For example, a housewife’s ad avoidance is extremely low in magazines and very high on radio, while a student’s ad avoidance is lowest on the Internet and a working male’s ad avoidance is lowest in newspapers.

The study distinguishes between active avoidance and passive avoidance. Active avoidance is described as a state when there is a deliberate attempt to change channels or block pop-ups on the Internet, while passive avoidance is sheer indifference to ads playing on any media.

The inference that could be derived from the study is that while consumers do not dislike advertisements on the whole, they certainly hate the clutter of advertisements. There are still about 83 per cent respondents who believe that advertisements give benefits.

Intellect has developed a measurement for engagement which is defined by factors such as content, relevance, interactivity and personalisation, called the CRIP score. The study highlights that the more consumers are engaged with a particular genre, the less likely they are to avoid ads in that genre. It states that news on television has emerged more engaging than newspapers.

According to Lynn de Souza, director, Lintas Media Group, this study, because of its specifics, will be much more helpful to advertisers than some existing measurement tools and will pave the way for greater emphasis on good content in ads so as to grab the consumers’ attention.

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