The Most Hated Online Advertising Techniques

In 2004, we wrote about the most hated advertising techniques based on research conducted by Christian Rohrer and John Boyd. Online advertising has changed significantly since then, giving us plenty of new formats to test and new questions to ask. With that, we decided to run a study to determine which advertising techniques are most disruptive and detrimental for the modern user experience. Methodology We conducted a survey with 452 adult respondents from the United States who were not employed in an IT- or marketing-related industry. In this survey, participants were shown 23 wireframes corresponding to different types of advertisements and rated how much they disliked them on a scale...
The ads that generated most positive comments were those which did not look like ads or were related to the user’s primary task. Participants spoke favorably about advertisements which “blended in” with content, like social media and prevideo ads (with skip). Sponsored social media ads tend to be displayed amidst other posts, formatted nearly identically, and prevideo advertisements were expected and tolerated (if they were not autoplay videos, and could be skipped). However, it’s important to note that deceptive links were vehemently disliked and not trusted for their lack of upfront