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PSYCHOLOGY

The IKEA Effect in advertising: why effort creates ownership

2026-03-028 min read

The IKEA effect is the documented cognitive bias where people value things more when they have invested effort in building them.

In advertising, this maps cleanly: a user who taps through five steps of a playable feels ownership of the reward in a way a banner click never creates.

We ran this experiment across 120 campaigns. This is what we found.

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