How Clutter Affects Advertising Effectiveness

ABSTRACT

Consolidating past findings on clutter with analysis of four new data sets, we document the empirical patterns for how advertising works in television and radio with different levels of clutter. We find that advertising avoidance is similar in low and high clutter environments, so when there is more clutter, audiences really do see more advertisements. Doubling the clutter, however, does not halve the number of advertisements recalled, and in less clutter audiences are less likely to correctly identify the advertised brand in commercials they do recall. Overall, we find that the impact of clutter is not large, especially when compared to creative elements of executions.