Which Products Are Best Suited to Mobile Advertising? A Field Study of Mobile Display Advertising Effects on Consumer Attitudes and Intentions

Mobile advertising is one of the fastest-growing advertising formats. In2013, global spending on mobile advertising was approximately $16.7billion, and it is expected to exceed 62.8 billion dollars by 2017. The mostprevalent type of mobile advertising is mobile display advertising (MDA),which takes the form of banners on mobile web pages and in mobileapplications. This article examines which product characteristics arelikely to be associated with MDA campaigns that are effective inincreasing consumers’ (1) favorable attitudes toward products and (2)purchase intentions. Data from a large-scale test-control field experimentcovering 54 U.S. MDA campaigns that ran between 2007 and 2010 andinvolved 39,946 consumers show that MDA campaigns significantlyincreased consumers’ favorable attitudes and purchase intentions onlywhen the campaigns advertised products that were higher (vs. lower)involvement and utilitarian (vs. hedonic). The authors explain this findingusing established theories of information processing and persuasion andsuggest that when MDAs work effectively, they do so by triggeringconsumers to recall and process previously stored product information