The Effects of Content Ephemerality on Information Processing

Abstract

Many marketing communications, from verbal conversations to messaging and content sharing via apps such as Snapchat, limit the number of times people can view content. How do such restrictions affect consumers’ information processing? Building on the proposition that people strategically allocate cognitive resources, we hypothesize that consumers of content that cannot be viewed repeatedly consider the risk of failing to process it sufficiently, and consequently allocate more cognitive resources to its processing (e.g., by increasing viewing time). We test this hypothesis in ten pre-registered online studies (total N = 17,620), an exploratory analysis of eye tracking data, and a field study on Facebook’s advertising platform. Across the studies, we find that making content ephemeral elevates consumers’ perceived risk of missing information; consequently, it increases attention allocation, prolongs voluntary viewing time, and magnifies focus on relevant information. These effects have important downstream consequences, including improved content comprehension and recall, enhanced positive attitudes, and increased efficiency of sponsored content placement on social media. Taken together, our findings indicate that marketers can communicate information more effectively by restricting consumers from viewing it again.

The Metaverse: A new digital frontier for consumer behavior

“…In addition, temporal persistence implies that as time passes in the Metaverse, experiences such as interactions with others are ephemeral or fleeting, much as they are in the physical world. Ephemerality tends to increase one's feeling of immersion in an experience (Kivetz & He, 2017), and the belief that content will disappear often leads to increased processing efforts (Barnea et al, 2023; Campbell et al, 2021). One might expect these outcomes to manifest in Metaversal experiences.…”

Effects of store fixture shape at retail checkout: Evidence from field and online studies

“…Second, by utilizing eye‐tracking data, we attempt to provide further evidence of the mediating role of visual attention. Particularly, we focus on the tower and rectangle conditions assessed in Study 3 for two reasons: On one hand, tower and rectangle conditions are applied as the key treatment and control conditions in the current research, while on the other hand, since conducting an eye‐tracking study is usually time‐consuming and requires complex procedures (Barnea et al., 2023), we focus on those two conditions to maximize the chances of reaching a sufficient sample size per condition.…”

“…Once participants felt that they had finished this task, they could proceed to the next page of the survey. As with previous literature (Armel et al., 2008; Barnea et al., 2023), we took the time spent by participants on this task (i.e., viewing time as recorded by Credamo), as an indicator of their visual attention (recording the time as zero if a participant chose to skip this task).…”

“…Additionally, Study 2 measured customers' purchase intentions in an incentive-compatible way and explored the underlying mechanism behind the proposed effect. Specifically, we measured the time that consumers spent viewing the fixture and its product displays as a behavioral proxy for visual attention (Armel et al, 2008;Barnea et al, 2023). Data.…”

The Influence of Interactivity and Ephemerality of Instagram Advertisements in Shaping Perceived Value and Behavioral Intention

“…Existing literature has mostly provided a general understanding of the efficacy of Instagram Stories as a promotional tool by comparing it with other formats or platforms [3]; [2]; [9]. Furthermore, studies on ephemeral content have primarily focused on information processing [10]; [4]. Based on this, there is a lack of in-depth research on the influence of interactivity and ephemerality of Instagram Stories ads on consumer responses.…”