Advertising Content and Television Advertising Avoidance

ABSTRACT This article proposes a new measure of television advertising avoidance, the Passive/Active Zap (PAZ), as an occurrence of a set-top box switching channels during a commercial break after at least 5 min of inactivity prior to the break. Twenty-seven percent of eligible commercial breaks are interrupted by a PAZ. A proportional hazards model is applied to a unique dataset to estimate the impact of advertising content and commercial break characteristics on PAZ behavior. The results show that advertising avoidance is negatively associated with movie ads and positively associated with advertising for websites, auto insurance and women’s clothing. Ad avoidance also tends to rise with repeated exposures to the same ad creative, advertising aired on general-interest television networks, later hours of the evening, and rainfall.