Digital advertising markets increasingly revolve around consumer engagement metrics, with platforms competing for attention through short-form video content. These strategies rest on the assumption that higher engagement proportionally enhances advertising impact.
We challenge this assumption by testing whether greater engagement with video content crowds out attention to advertising. Using experiments with TikTok and YouTube Shorts users, we find substantial crowd-out: attention-grabbing video content significantly reduces ad recall. Our results also indicate an engagement-memory tradeoff when platforms choose the similarity of ad content to short-form video content: higher similarity increases engagement, but decreases recall, consistent with interference.
About the speaker
Alex Imas is Professor of Behavioral Science, Economics and Applied AI at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Faculty Affiliate of the Center for Applied AI and the Human Capital & Economic Opportunity, an NBER Faculty Research Associate, and a CESifo Research Network Fellow. He is also an Associate Editor at the Journal of the European Economic Association and on the editorial board of Psychological Science. His research is on behavioral economics with a focus on cognition and mental representation in dynamic decision-making and it has appeared in the American Economic Review, Journal of Finance, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Quarterly Journal of Economics, and Management Science.
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