Social Media Pop-Up Advertisements and Smartphone Users' Behaviour Among Undergraduates at the University of Ibadan

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Social media's widespread use has transformed advertising by enabling marketers to deliver targeted, oftenintrusive pop-up advertisements. While previous studies have examined digital advertising broadly, limitedattention has focused on how social media pop-up advertisements influence undergraduate smartphoneusers, a group with extensive daily engagement with mobile devices and social media. Guided by the uses and gratifications theory and the advertising avoidance theory, this study examined the social media pop-up advertisements encountered by undergraduates at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, their classifications, and users' behavioural responses. A descriptive survey design was adopted, and 392 undergraduates werepurposively sampled using the Taro Yamane formula; 332 valid responses (an 84.5% response rate) wereanalysed using SPSS version 25. Findings showed that respondents were exposed to diverse pop-upadvertisement formats, particularly on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and X. The advertisementsdemonstrated high contextual relevance and sensory appeal, moderate trust cues, and persistent conversionpressure. Respondents identified at least nine advertisement content categories, with fashion, entertainment,and online retail among the most frequently encountered. Pop-up advertisements influenced respondents'attitudes and purchase consideration but also disrupted time management and raised privacy concerns. Thestudy concluded that social media pop-up advertisements significantly shaped undergraduate smartphoneusers' behaviour and recommended that undergraduates manage their exposure during study periods, resisturgency-driven advertising cues, strengthen privacy settings, and develop digital advertising literacy tosupport more informed engagement with online advertisements.