Mobile advertising: evaluating the effects of animation, user and content relevance

  • Authors:

  • Marco de Sa;Vidhya Navalpakkam;Elizabeth F. Churchill

  • Affiliations:

  • Facebook, Inc., Palo Alto, California, USA;Google, Inc., Mountain View, California, USA;eBay Research Lab, San Jose, California, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

The potential for user-relevant, context-appropriate, targeted advertising on mobile devices is enormous given device improvements and advances in personal and location-based data collection. However, little is known about how users experience display advertisements ('ads') on mobile devices, or what factors drive mobile ad effectiveness. In this paper, we investigate users' experiences of display advertising on mobile devices. We consider three factors that are often studied in desktop settings the ad's level of personal relevance to the user, its relevance to the page content, and within-ad properties, with a particular focus on the level of animation in the ad. Our findings reveal a few surprises. First, personal relevance to the user has little or no impact on ad efficacy measured by recall. Instead, content relevance boosts ad recall. Second, user relevance leads to a more pleasant and interesting experience, but content relevance has no effect. Third, contrary to the popular notion that animation often leads to more effective ads by garnering more user attention, we find that a simple type of animation, such as blinking animation, negatively affects user experience and reduces ad recall. Our findings, while focused on advertising, offer insights for design of mobile content presentation in general.