Advertisers today can exploit numerous media, but the essential challenges of reaching consumers remain unchanged. HKUST’s Song Lin presents a unifying framework of traditional and 21st-century advertising formats to help online media maximize profitability.

“Advertisements aim to capture consumer attention, a process unfolding over time,” the researcher notes. With this fundamental principle, advertising via any medium can be described by a model capturing the interplay—or misalignment—between advertisers’ need to grab consumer attention and consumers’ desire to access media content and product information.

Ads are only relevant if they signal the match between consumers and products. “For the consumer to engage with the ad and for the medium to profit from it,” Lin explains, “the ad must be sufficiently informative.” Media, however, cannot tell whether consumers actually engage with ads, and this knowledge gap factors into their strategy.

Lin’s model yields particular insight into interactive ads on streaming platforms that can be skipped after a certain time. Apparently, the informativeness of such adverts determines whether platforms should design them to be more static, like newspaper ads that the consumer can choose to read or ignore, or more sequential, akin to TV commercials that must be watched before accessing content.

Specifically, if an ad is highly informative, online media should grant viewers a static-ad-like level of control, letting them watch the ad or skip to the media content immediately. However, for moderately informative ads, the medium profits from tighter control (making the ad un-skippable or forcing a long wait), thus replicating a sequential-ad scenario.

“At first glance,” Lin notes, the skippable format “appears puzzling.” Yet Lin’s model explains the prevalence of this format online, while providing valuable guidance for advertisers’ media selection. Practitioners stand to benefit deeply from this insightful way of understanding advertising from both business and consumer perspectives.