UC Riverside Undergraduate Research Journal

In the digital media age, video advertisements are ubiquitous, including on plat- forms such as YouTube and TikTok. People generally do not like advertisements, especially non-skippable ones, and may prefer to do something else while an ad plays. Following recent research suggesting that faster speeds may increase engage- ment with videos, we examine if speeding up video advertisements will increase people’s attention when watching non-skippable ads as well as improve ad expe- rience and memory. In two experiments, college participants were randomly as- signed to watch an ad (Vrbo in Study 1, Five Star Notebooks in Study 2) at either normal or 25% faster (1.25x) speed. We did not find significant effects of play- back speed in Study 1, perhaps because the ad did not have much informational content. However, in Study 2, we found that participants who watched the ad at 1.25x speed enjoyed it less, remembered it less well, and had lower brand sentiment than those who watched it at normal speed. While these findings need replication and further research to test robustness across a range of ad types and lengths, our results suggest that increase the speed of ads may not be beneficial to advertisers.