Digital video is growing rapidly, offering new opportunities and formats for television advertising. One of these new formats is “limited-interruption” advertising, in which each midroll advertising break during a video features just one commercial. Advertisers can pay a premium to repeat the same advertisement in each limited-interruption break. This study provides empirical guidance to advertisers by quantifying the positive and negative effects of repeated limited interruption.

Although measuring exposure to public health messages is key to understanding campaign effectiveness, little is known about how exposure to and avoidance of digital ad messages may influence self-reported ad recall. A sample of 15–24-year-olds (n = 297) received a varying number of forced-view and skippable test ads across multiple simulated YouTube^TM sessions. Each session was coded for whether the participant viewed the ad or skipped it. While a majority of participants recalled the test ad, the odds of ad recall did not vary by number of sessions (opportunities for exposure). Rather, ad recall was sensitive to the number of completed ad views such that odds of ad recall doubled for each additional time the ad was completely viewed. Findings suggest that public health digital message exposure and recall can be optimized with sufficient attention paid to the proportions of forced-view ads aired when aiming to reach younger audiences.