EXPRESS: The Role of Digital Ad Clutter in Ad Viewership and Memory

Advertisers face an increasingly cluttered digital ecosystem where customer attention matters. Despite this, the extent to which digital advertising clutter influences ad viewership remains unclear. This paper presents three separate eye-tracking experiments (subjects: N = 99, N = 250, and N = 575) using over a dozen custom-built web pages to better understand how digital ad clutter affects consumers’ viewing of digital ads. Across experiments, we show that increased clutter led consumers to allocate more attention to the overall advertising space and adjust how they distribute viewership across ad positions. A complementary survey revealed that clutter also reduced ad memory and recall for individual ads. We discuss the implications for advertisers and publishers regarding ad pricing and placement in crowded digital environments.