Personalized Advertising Irritation Scale

What it measures

An eight-item, seven-point scale measuring the degree to which a person finds personalized advertising through a specific medium to be negative, irritating, and repellent. The scale uses a flexible stem that allows the focal medium to be specified (e.g., e-mail, direct mail, text messages, telemarketing). Items are uni-polar adjectives rated on a strongly disagree to strongly agree format. Adapted from a prior advertising irritation measure developed in the context of television commercials for use across four personalised advertising media. The parent study examined three determinants of advertising avoidance — perceived personalisation, privacy concerns, and ad irritation — with CFA conducted across the combined four-media dataset.

Response format

7-point scale (1=strongly disagree, 7=strongly agree); stem: 'When I receive personalized advertising on _____, I think it is...'; insert medium name in blank

Scale items

• negative
• irritating
• pointless
• unappealing
• regressive
• unattractive
• vulgar
• awful

Full scale items shown. Always cite the original source when using this scale in research.

Usage notes & scoring

The scale was adapted for personalised advertising contexts from an advertising irritation measure originally developed for television commercials by Fritz (1979, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 7(1), 1-13). Items are evaluated against a contextualised stem (medium name inserted in blank) rather than rated as independent statements. Reliability and validity were evaluated with data pooled across four media types (direct mail, unsolicited commercial e-mail, telephone calls, text messages). CFA supported convergent and discriminant validity; AVE = .572. Ad irritation emerged as a significant direct predictor of advertising avoidance in the structural model. Companion construct to the Perceived Ad Personalization Scale (ID 597) and Affective Response to Advertising Vulnerability Scale (ID 581), which address related dimensions of personalised advertising response.

Recommended companion scales

Citation

Baek, T.H., & Morimoto, M. (2012). Stay away from me: Examining the determinants of consumer avoidance of personalized advertising. Journal of Advertising, 41(1), 59-76.

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