摘要
Interactive display advertising increasingly employs delayed product disclosure in multi-stage formats, yet little is known about how they affect purchase behavior when exposure to the reveal depends on users’ interaction. This article studies interactive blind lead-in (BLI) ads with a randomized field experiment: over 109,000 customers of a book retailer were assigned to a BLI ad with delayed reveal or a static ad with immediate disclosure. The experiment identifies a boundary condition on the transfer of prior interactivity findings to user-controlled delayed-reveal advertising: assignment to the BLI format does not increase average purchase conversion, as interactivity’s positive mechanisms need not produce a conversion gain when most exposures end before the reveal. Using random assignment as an instrument, completing the BLI sequence increases long-term purchase conversion among compliers (a 46.6% lift; 437 completions per incremental purchase), indicating that delayed-reveal interactivity is effective only when users meaningfully interact with the ad. Completion varies across ads consistent with a Cost-of-Progress framework: early informational cues predict higher completion, late-stage textual and visual complexity predicts lower completion, and social cues predict higher completion when placed before the final stage. A supplementary study shows that the downstream impact of BLI interaction depends on overall hedonic experience.