Make ads skippable or not: The impact of ad type on brand recall, salience and conversion rate

In today’s world, people are using digital platforms more than ever to communicate with friends, network, shop, learn and more. The average time spent on these platforms is increasing. Companies are naturally reflecting this fact in order to reach as many people as possible through these platforms and their advertising messages. However, users are constantly bombarded with advertising messages that fragment their attention. It is, therefore, important to study the effects of different types of video advertising, with or without skipping, on consumers’ purchasing decisions and to create ads that perform better but do not distract the audience. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to investigate the effect of skipping ads in terms of brand memorability and brand salience on subsequent conversion performance in an e-commerce store. The results of the study show that consumers achieve lower brand recall and conversion rates when shown a non-skippable ad than a skippable ad. On the other hand, while skippable ads are associated with higher levels of actual brand recall, from a more holistic perspective, the non-skippable ad type is better suited to increase brand salience, which appears to be more important for subsequent future purchase execution at the retailer.