Online Display Advertising: Targeting and Obtrusiveness

For your marketing

Possible founder application

Use this study as a bounded example related to online display advertising: targeting and obtrusiveness; evaluate whether its customers, intervention and outcome match your own context.

Reported result

What the study found

Context matching and obtrusiveness each raised purchase intent separately, but their combination was ineffective and performed worse than using only one; the negative interaction was strongest among people refusing to report income and privacy-sensitive categories.

Research question

What the authors investigated

What does online display advertising: targeting and obtrusiveness show about customer behavior or marketing outcomes?

Design

Large-scale field experiment varying whether display ads matched website content (contextual targeting) and ad obtrusiveness; outcome was purchase intent, with heterogeneity by privacy-related measures/categories.

Sample and setting

Visitors/users exposed to online display advertising in the field; the publisher abstract identifies a large-scale field experiment but does not give an N.

Scope and transfer

Limitations to keep in view

Conservative inference: purchase intent rather than realized purchase is the reported outcome in the abstract, and the field setting/creative are not specified there; generalization beyond those conditions is uncertain. Full-text methods and correction history were not independently checked.

Research sources

Study metadata and reported results were cross-checked against a direct publisher-page retrieval; detailed full-text methods were not reviewed.