JAR Inside the Research Podcast
This podcast gives listeners a look at the latest research articles published in the Journal of Advertising Research. Listen to authors describe their work and what motivated it, explore challenges they faced in the research process, and describe what they'd like to researched next.
JAR Inside the Research Podcast
The Impact of Ad Repetition on Viewer Attention in Connected and Linear Television
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In this episode, we speak with Kalyan Rallabandi (Bucknell University) to discuss his article, "The Impact of Ad Repetition on Viewer Attention in Connected and Linear Television," coauthored with Hyung Sup (Zack) Bhan (Radford University) and Seoungwoo Lee (Yonsei University), published in the June 2026 issue of JAR.
Kalyan explains how the team used a remarkably rich TVision Insights dataset, shared through the JAR-TVision data release call, that tracks second-by-second attention for over 1,000 viewers via in-home webcams paired with automatic content recognition data. The headline finding is that viewer attention falls with each repeated exposure to an ad, and the decline is noticeably steeper on connected TV than on linear TV, where attention tends to plateau. When the same ad is repeated within narrow windows like a single day or hour, attention decay accelerates on both platforms, but CTV remains the worse offender. The likely culprit is the very thing that makes CTV attractive: viewers there are more engaged and in control, so repeated ad interruptions cost more attention.
The practical takeaway for advertisers is that the common instinct to pile repetition onto CTV because engagement is high actually works against you, and wider spacing between exposures is the safer play. Kalyan also points to structural problems in the CTV ecosystem, where walled gardens and weak cross-platform frequency capping leave agencies with little control over how often viewers see the same ad, and suggests attention-based pricing as a natural evolution. Our discussion also digs into the endogeneity challenge behind the scenes, where naïve estimates showed attention rising with repetition until granular viewer-by-ad fixed effects revealed the true pattern, plus future directions like linking attention to sales outcomes and modeling the wear-in and wear-out sweet spot for repetition.
Read the full paper here: https://doi.org/10.1080/00218499.2025.2538940
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