How many ads do you see on social media? It might be more than you realize. Scientists studying how ads work on Instagram-style social media have found that people are not as good at spotting them as they think. If people recognized ads, they usually ignored them - but some, designed to blend in with your friends' posts, flew under the radar.
"We wanted to understand how ads are really experienced in daily scrolling — beyond what people say they notice, to what they actually process," said Maike Hübner, PhD candidate at the University of Twente, corresponding author of the article in Frontiers in Psychology. "It's not that people are worse at spotting ads. It's that platforms have made ads better at blending in. We scroll on autopilot, and that's when ads slip through. We may even engage with ads on purpose, because they're designed to reflect the trends or products our friends are talking about and of course we want to keep up. That's what makes them especially hard to resist."
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