Brits express annoyance at online ads

Wednesday, August 12, 2015 - 12:28 by Graham Miller

A study has come to the perhaps unsurprising conclusion that consumers in the UK, who use the internet on a regular basis, are not that keen on the ads that are embedded in pages or pop up to interrupt their online experience.

The Criteo survey revealed that younger people are more likely to engage positively with ads compared with their older counterparts. Forty per cent of millennial respondents cited e-commerce promotions as giving their mood a boost when they encounter them.

This drops to just a sixth for people over the age of 55, meaning that if brands and retailers want to convince people to carry out safe shopping online after seeing an ad, they are going to get better results by targeting the generation which grew up using the internet.

A quarter of Brits are more likely to notice an ad if it utilises the colour red in some way. And colour is more of an influencing factor for men than it is for women.

A third of those questioned said that encountering an ad five times or more will allow them to start to build an interest in, and bond with, a given brand. And this necessity of repeat viewing perhaps explains why online ad campaigns can feel so pervasive across multiple sites.

Retailers need to find new ways to make people click on ads and carry out purchases via safe shopping online. And unlike traditional advertising media, the internet makes it possible to chart the detailed journeys taken by consumers between first encountering a product and eventually buying it.

Of course, the ads themselves are not always entirely successful, often resulting in people being annoyed rather than engaged by them. But since ads help to pay for the sites that people use for free, they are not going away any time soon.