Three Roles of Antecedents of Ad Avoidance in Digital Media: A Constructive Choice Approach

Digital ad avoidance is regarded as a significant threat to the interactive marketing industry. Limited knowledge of how each antecedent uniquely contributes to digital ad avoidance is detrimental not only to a deeper academic understanding but also to marketers controlling these factors. The purpose of this conceptual paper is to theorize how different antecedents play different roles in generating digital ad avoidance, based on constructive choice theory. We theorize that the main antecedents of digital ad avoidance play three distinct roles. Group 1 (ad skepticism and prior negative experiences) acts as the fundamental drivers governing the entire process of digital ad avoidance; Group 2 (intrusiveness, perceived goal impediment, and ad clutter) triggers complete avoidance when consumers exhibit moderate skepticism toward digital ads; and Group 3 (perceived relevance, perceived personalization, and privacy concerns) shifts the accuracy of partial avoidance and non-avoidance when consumers are less skeptical of digital ads. The proposed theory bridges interactive advertising research with cognitive psychology and behavioral decision research, providing a complementary perspective to psychological reactance theory.