Ad creep

Coined in 1996, the term 'ad creep' describes a loose collection of practices where the prominence and number of advertisements is increased in places which previously had fewer, or less intrusive, advertisements. This can lead to worsened consumer experiences, as additional advertisements disrupt and distract the consumer from their product or service. The earliest verified appearance of the phrase is in a March 1996 article by Steve Johnson for the Chicago Tribune, which described product placement and similar techniques as part of an environment in which the commercial approach to the viewer had become close to continuous.

Such ad creep was historically confined to the simple addition of adverts, but the ever-increasing ubiquity of the internet and smart devices has changed the nature of where and how it is possible to display ads and make the consumer interact with them, leading to new forms of ad creep.

How it works

The willingness of advertisers to pay for ad placements almost anywhere means that companies and other institutions with 'free space' are financially incentivised to fill that space with adverts, provided they can do so without losing customers.

This can take the form of introducing adverts to a space, product, or service which previously carried none, or of increasing the number, size, or prominence of the adverts already present. Where that space is one the consumer has already paid for, the additional revenue is collected without any corresponding reduction in the price paid.

The incentives involved could play out as follows: A gas station wants to increase profits. After running the numbers, they determine that increasing the price of store goods or gas will turn customers away; so instead they turn to new revenue sponsors featuring ad slots on the gas pumps, which users must watch before fuel begins being dispensed. Advertiser may be willing to pay even more if the gas fill rate slows down so that the consumer is exposed to the advertising for a longer period. Ultimately, this leaves the consumer paying full price for a worse experience.

The advertising industry has generally presented this expansion as a response to changing consumer behaviour rather than as an erosion of ad-free space. A 2007 report in The New York Times on the spread of advertising into new physical locations recorded the view of advertisers that fragmented viewing and reading habits made it necessary to reach consumers at every available point, and that audiences may tolerate saturation where the adverts themselves are considered entertaining. The same shift away from traditional media has been linked to a parallel effort to reach individuals at precisely selected moments rather than simply more often.

Consumer advocacy organisations have understandably taken a much dimmer view of the situation. Commercial Alert, a non-profit founded to limit commercial culture to what it regarded as its proper sphere, characterised the industry as engaged in a sustained effort to occupy every waking moment of a consumer's attention, quoting one executive's description of the objective as "mind share".

Increased advert frequency

The increased frequency of ads takes many forms, from the use of more public space for posters and billboards, to increases in the number of minutes per hour dedicated to advertisement on TV channels.

Increases of this kind are typically gradual, and each individual increase is small enough that it is unlikely to be noticed by any particular viewer. A 2017 analysis published by the marketing firm Kantar Millward Brown recorded that average advertising loads on national television in the United States rose from 10.4 minutes per hour in December 2014 to 10.9 minutes per hour in December 2016. The author noted that, although the increase amounted to less than 5%, the accumulation of advertising clutter was likely to be counterproductive for the brands paying for the placements.

Ad creep can also refer to the gradual introduction of further advertising into contexts where advertising is already expected and accepted by the viewer, such as product placements within television programming. While this is a distinct phenomenon from the placement of adverts into previously ad-free spaces, the underlying commercial incentive is the same.

Intrusive ads

Intrusive ads are a subcategory of adverts which are particularly or unusually disruptive to the consumer, typically because they demand the consumer's attention, or their active participation, in circumstances where the consumer has agreed to provide neither.

Factors contributing to ad intrusiveness

Exactly what one might consider unneccesarily intrusive will vary from person to person, but common facets that contribute towards a particular ad being perceived as intrusive include the placement of adverts in paid products/services, the user being forced to look at or interact with the advert in order to access a product or service, the advert being very prominent or large, the viewer having made no implicit or explicit 'bargain' to view the ad, or adverts being introduced to scenarios which were previously ad-free.

• Viewer expectations: When considering a viewer's expectations, it is reasonable to consider what a normal person would expect in a scenario - even if a provision is technically present within a product or service's terms and conditions, a user may not expect the adverts in a particular context without an explicit notice prior to purchasing a paid product or service.

Similarly, adverts in non-paid contexts can violate user expectations when they exceed their expected bounds. A user may expect a free computer program or app to show them adverts as they are using the app, but they would not reasonably expect the app to continually generate full-screen pop-up adverts every 10 minutes, even when the user is not using the program, as is common among apps targeted at non-tech-savvy users (e.g. PDF readers, "Phone cleanup" apps, etc.).

This issue is generally mitigated when the viewer has made a conscious 'bargain' of some kind, where they are receiving something of value for watching the ad (e.g. watch an ad in exchange for free video content, or resources in a game, or in exchange for a discounted product).

• Ad avoidability: Essentially, how easy is it for the viewer to avoid interacting with the advert? Typically avoidability is at its lowest when a viewer is required to interact with, or view, the advert in order to interact with something, and at its highest when the user simply has to not interact with the advert (e.g. a promotional leaflet).

• Ad 'intensity': A combination of the loudness, size, and disruption caused to the viewer by an advert. A loud advert that takes up a whole screen and does not allow the viewer to interact with their product or service until it is finished playing is much more intense than, for example, a static image placed beside content.

• Whether the product or service showing ads to the customer is one they have paid for.

Examples

Intrusive ads

See the list of companies utilizing intrusive advertisements for an extended list of examples of intrusive advertising documented by Wiki users.

• In the case of LG's hijacking of the Windows driver process to install adware, the viewer of the adverts would have paid for the monitor used to install and display the adverts, would never have reasonably expected the purchase of their monitor to result in the display of ads, and are forced to interact with the adverts in order to dismiss them.
• BMW putting Spider-Man ads across the in-car display.
• Samsung updating certain smart fridges to add adverts inside the home, on an expensive appliance.
• Microsoft Windows integrating ads in their paid operating system, in components such as the Start menu, the desktop, settings, and file explorer. Coverage in 2017 described the promotion of Microsoft's own products to users of competing browsers as a further extension of advertising within the operating system.
• smart TVs integrating ads into their menus. Advertising on a television set is no longer confined to the programming shown on it. Manufacturers place promotional banners on the home screen, sell advertising space within screensavers, and insert sponsored rows into the interfaces used to select an input or launch an application, none of which the viewer has chosen to view and all of which appear on hardware the viewer has bought outright. Television manufacturers including LG and Vizio have recorded faster revenue growth from advertising sales than from hardware, and Roku, which supplies the operating system used in televisions sold under several brands, attributed the majority of its growth in 2021 to advertising rather than devices. One media consultant characterised the appeal in straightforward terms: a television is sold once, but advertising can be sold on it indefinitely. Reporting on Roku's 2023 financial year recorded a loss of $44 million on television hardware against $1.6 billion earned from advertising and services.
• A patent application assigned to Roku and published in 2023 as US 20230388589A1, titled "HDMI customized ad insertion", describes a display device which detects a pause in content arriving from a connected device such as a games console, set-top box, or disc player, and then displays an advertisement over the top of it. The application describes detecting the pause by monitoring the video signal for unchanging frames, the absence of audio, or an on-screen pause symbol, or by receiving a signal from the remote control or the HDMI connection itself, and describes using content recognition to select an advertisement related to what is on screen. Such a system would insert advertising into content the manufacturer does not supply, including content the viewer has separately paid for. There is no evidence that the system described has been built.
• A patent held by Sony, titled "System for converting television commercials into interactive networked video games", describes an advertising system in which the viewer is prompted to say the advertiser's brand name aloud in order to end a commercial, with a microphone and voice recognition used to confirm that they have done so. Other embodiments described in the same patent require the viewer to perform motion-controlled actions to shorten an advert, and contemplate rewarding participation with coupons or points. The patent, filed in 2009 and granted in 2012, has not been shown to have been deployed in a commercial product.
• Advertising has been placed on parts of the physical environment not previously used for the purpose. A company founded in 2009 produced stamps designed to imprint advertisements into the sand at public beaches, a practice which was reported as potentially unlawful on US public land. In 2011, a clothing retailer in New Zealand fitted bus stop benches with raised plates that imprinted its advertising onto the legs of those who sat on them, and in 2012 a Japanese agency recruited approximately 1,300 women to wear advertising stickers on their thighs in exchange for payment.
• Digital advertising screens installed in the elevators of residential buildings have attracted criticism on the grounds that residents cannot avoid them within their own homes. In 2025, a student at Shanghai University shut down more than 100 such screens without damaging them, prompting public discussion of the commercial use of residential common spaces and of the volume at which the advertisements were played.

Increased ad frequency

• Some TV channels alter the shows or movies they transmit by increasing a little their reproduction speed in order to create more space for advertisements. ^{[citation needed]}
• The Super Bowl broadcast in the United States has seen increases in both the time given over to advertising and the number of separate advertising messages carried. Reporting in 2011 counted close to 48 minutes of commercials across the previous year's broadcast.
• Advertising has been progressively added to the playing surfaces, equipment, and uniforms used in professional sport. The NBA, the last of the major North American leagues to do so, introduced advertising patches on player jerseys for the 2017–18 season, and the programme has continued since.

Relevant legislation

The topic of increasingly frequent and excessively intrusive advertising has been legally addressed in a number of jurisdictions:

• European Union: the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD) limits the proportion of broadcasting time that may be given over to television advertising and teleshopping. The original limit of 12 minutes in any given hour was replaced, by amendments adopted in 2018 and due to be implemented by member states by September 2020, with an overall limit of 20% of broadcasting time calculated separately across the periods 06:00–18:00 and 18:00–24:00. The stated purpose of splitting the day in this way was to prevent advertising from being concentrated into peak viewing hours, while the change from an hourly limit gives broadcasters greater freedom over when advertising is shown. Member states remain free to impose stricter limits on providers under their own jurisdiction.
• United States: the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act (CALM Act) of 2010 directed the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to require that commercials are transmitted at an average volume no greater than that of the programming they accompany. The resulting rules took effect on 2012-12-13 and apply to television broadcasters, cable operators, and other multichannel video programming distributors. They do not apply to radio, to advertisements delivered over the internet, or to streaming services. In 2025, the FCC opened a consultation on whether these rules should be updated, noting a marked rise in complaints about loud commercials and reports that the average-loudness standard may be circumvented by placing exceptionally loud sounds at the start of an advertisement.
• Brazil: the city of São Paulo adopted the Lei Cidade Limpa (Clean City Law) in September 2006, which took effect on 2007-01-01 and prohibited outdoor advertising throughout the city, including billboards, transit advertising, and the distribution of leaflets in public spaces. Roughly 15,000 billboards were removed, alongside several hundred thousand oversized business signs. The measure was opposed by outdoor advertising interests, who warned of substantial revenue and job losses, but surveys of residents conducted after its implementation recorded majority approval.

These measures share a common limitation. Each addresses advertising in a context that was already understood to be commercial, whether broadcast television or public space, and each regulates the frequency, volume, or placement of advertising rather than the question of whether it may be introduced at all. None of them address the more recent practice of adding advertisements to a device, appliance, or piece of software after the consumer has bought it, where the consumer has already paid the full purchase price and has no realistic means of declining.

See also

• Advertising overload
• Personalized ads
• Enshittification