The Power of Emotion: How Admiration and Gratitude Can Influence Ad Skipping
- DVJ Research Group
- 1 ago
- 6 Min. de lectura
Blog by Femke Vriend
The online video advertising industry is expanding rapidly, with the market valued at $191 billion in 2024 and projected to reach $268 billion by 2029 (Statista, 2024). This growth highlights online video as a crucial advertising medium, offering diverse, creative, and customised strategies. Despite these benefits, a significant challenge persists: ad skipping.
Approximately 90% of consumers habitually skip pre-roll video advertisements (MAGNA, 2017). This behaviour leads to lower brand recall, favourability, and purchase intention for businesses. Given these negative effects, addressing ad skipping is crucial for improving ad effectiveness. A potential strategy to reduce ad skipping lies in the use of emotional appeals in advertising. This research dives into the impact of specific complex emotional appeals, admiration and gratitude, on reducing ad skipping, and reveals whether product type (hedonic vs. utilitarian) even makes a difference.
Unpacking Complex Emotions in Advertising
Emotional appeals in advertising aim to connect with viewers on a deeper level. While some studies have explored basic emotions (e.g., joy, surprise, anger or sadness), which occur quickly and are automatic in nature (Ekman, 1992; Izard, 1993), this research focuses on complex emotional appeals. Complex emotions, unlike basic ones, require varying degrees of cognitive effort to interpret (Shiv and Fedorikhin, 1999). Previous research by Campbell et al. (2017) found that advertisements using complex emotional appeals were more effective at reducing pre-roll ad skipping compared to those employing basic emotional appeals. Their study explored emotions such as exhilaration, entertainment, humour, nostalgia, relaxation, shock, and warmth, finding that humour, entertainment, and warmth significantly reduced ad skipping.
To further build on this, this study investigated two additional complex emotional appeals: admiration and gratitude. These emotions are particularly relevant because of their self-conscious nature, meaning they involve heightened self-awareness (Edy and Ashgarie, 2024; Homan and Hosack, 2019; Immordino-Yang and Sylvan, 2010). As self-conscious emotions, they are more cognitively demanding than basic emotions, making them especially pertinent in the context of ad skipping (Bi et al., 2022; Izard et al., 1999; Japutra et al., 2022; Lewis, 1993; Manalu et al., 2022; Tracy and Robins, 2004).
Admiration is defined as a positively valenced emotion triggered by recognising excellence in others, often motivating emulation (Onu et al., 2016). Gratitude is an attribution-dependent state that occurs when an individual recognises they have benefited from another’s intentional actions (Emmons & McCullough, 2003). By expanding the range of complex emotional appeals examined, this research provides a more comprehensive understanding of how complex emotions can influence ad skipping.
Data Collection
This study employed an archival research approach, utilising a unique dataset. The dataset comprised survey-based evaluations of 216 pre-roll video advertisements, collected from over 17,000 individual responses across seven countries: Czechia, Germany, Sweden, Poland, the Netherlands, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The advertisements spanned 22 distinct product categories and 96 unique product types.
To ensure internal validity and focus on the relevant emotional input, advertisements containing only written communication were excluded, as spoken communication elicits stronger emotional responses (Berger et al., 2022). This resulted in a subset of 150 ads with spoken dialogue. Furthermore, since prior research identifies the first five seconds before skipping is possible as a key decision point (Campbell et al., 2017; Jeon et al., 2024), the analysis focused on the spoken content within this initial five-second window. This led to a final sample of 135 pre-roll video advertisements, with 10,596 individual responses.
Respondents were recruited via online research panels using stratified sampling and quota controls to ensure representative subgroup distributions. Data collection involved in-context exposure to digital advertising within simulated web environments. Pre-roll video ads were shown before video content and were non-skippable for the first five seconds, after which participants could skip. System-level tracking recorded viewing duration, providing behavioural exposure metrics. Ad skipping was operationalised as a binary behavioural measure: 0 if the respondent watched the full advertisement, and 1 if they skipped it at any point after the initial five seconds.
This individual-level binary measure avoids the limitations of aggregated measures, such as the ecological fallacy (Pollet et al., 2015), and allows for controlling individual-level factors like age and gender. To quantify the presence of admiration and gratitude, state-of-the-art tools for transcription, transcription review, translation, and emotion classification were applied to the spoken content. In the figure below, you can see an overview of the complex emotional appeals extraction process.
Key Findings
The analysis delivered some clear takeaways for advertisers. Our data revealed significant effects for both admiration and gratitude: ads that successfully evoked admiration and gratitude each lowered the probability of viewers skipping the ad.
What does this tell us? Complex emotions like admiration and gratitude increase a viewer's cognitive load. When people are more deeply absorbed in what they're watching, they have fewer mental resources available to notice or act on the skip button. This also means they're less likely to realise they're being persuaded, making them less inclined to resist the ad. Essentially, admiration and gratitude engage viewers just enough to hold their attention without overwhelming them, making ad skipping less likely.
What's also interesting? The study found that product type (whether it's a fun, hedonic item or a practical, utilitarian one) did not significantly change how effective admiration and gratitude were in reducing ad skipping. This means these powerful emotional appeals work across the board for both hedonic and utilitarian products. It's possible that even everyday utilitarian products can be presented with a touch of emotion in advertising, blurring those strict lines for viewers.
Managerial Implications
These findings offer clear, actionable guidance for managers diving into digital campaign development. Given that ad skipping directly harms brand recall, favourability, and purchase intention, reducing this behaviour is crucial.
Firstly, admiration and gratitude could be integrated into pre-roll video ads. Our results strongly suggest that weaving these emotions into the spoken content can significantly reduce ad skipping. For instance, you could verbally express gratitude by thanking your audience or acknowledging customer support. Similarly, highlighting achievements, values, or excellence can evoke admiration.
Another key takeaway is the universal effectiveness across product types. The positive effects of admiration and gratitude are consistent for both hedonic (pleasure-focused) and utilitarian (practical) products. This broad applicability means you can confidently prioritise these complex emotional appeals across your entire campaign portfolio, from luxury items and entertainment to everyday appliances and financial services. This strategic insight equips you with a powerful tool to design more effective pre-roll video advertisements that resonate widely.
By strategically using complex emotional appeals like admiration and gratitude, advertisers can significantly boost viewer engagement and enhance the overall effectiveness of their digital advertising campaigns in today's highly competitive online video landscape.
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