Digital Exhaustion and Selective Engagement With Promotional Content: The Roles of Perceived Intrusiveness, Relevance, and Attentional Control

Aoife M. Brennan

Digital Exhaustion and Selective Engagement With Promotional Content: The Roles of Perceived Intrusiveness, Relevance, and Attentional Control

Author(s)	Dr. Aoife M. Brennan
Country	United States
Abstract	The expansion of digitally mediated consumption has substantially increased the volume and frequency of promotional messages encountered by consumers. Email campaigns, mobile notifications, social-media advertisements, sponsored recommendations, retargeting messages, and platform-based promotional prompts compete continuously for limited cognitive attention. Although increased digital contact provides organizations with additional opportunities to communicate with customers, excessive exposure may contribute to digital exhaustion, attentional depletion, irritation, and increasingly selective responses to promotional content. This study develops a simulation-based framework for examining how digital exhaustion influences consumers' willingness to engage with promotional messages and whether perceived relevance, advertising intrusiveness, and attentional control modify this relationship. A synthetic dataset representing 360 hypothetical digital consumers was constructed across low, moderate, and high digital-exhaustion conditions. Selective engagement was operationalized as intentional attention to, evaluation of, or interaction with promotional content perceived as sufficiently useful or relevant. The simulated analysis indicates that mean selective-engagement scores decline from 5.82 under low digital exhaustion to 4.63 under moderate exhaustion and 3.21 under high exhaustion. Regression estimates further suggest a substantial negative association between exhaustion and promotional engagement, while perceived relevance and attentional control partially offset this decline. Perceived intrusiveness intensifies disengagement. The findings support an attention-conservation interpretation in which digitally fatigued consumers become less responsive to promotional volume and increasingly dependent on immediate relevance before allocating cognitive resources. The study contributes a responsible digital-marketing perspective by suggesting that increasing promotional frequency may reduce rather than improve communication effectiveness when consumer attention is already saturated. The simulation provides a transparent framework for subsequent validation through field experiments, behavioral analytics, or consumer surveys.
Keywords	digital exhaustion; promotional content; selective engagement; advertising avoidance; perceived intrusiveness; consumer attention; digital marketing; information overload
Field	Engineering
Published In	Volume 5, Issue 6, November-December 2024
Published On	2024-12-04

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Digital Exhaustion and Selective Engagement With Promotional Content: The Roles of Perceived Intrusiveness, Relevance, and Attentional Control

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