Distracted viewers can be prime targets for ads, study finds

"the researchers found that the more a participant engaged with an NFL game they were watching on TV, the more likely they were to remember advertisements being shown to them on a mobile device. They also identified a few factors that made an advertisement more likely to stick with a distracted consumer, such as when the advertisement is shown, the similarity between the advertisement and the consumer's environment, and even the physical distance between the advertisement and the distraction, the NFL game in this case."

"For their latest research, Sunil Wattal, professor of management information systems and the Schaefer Senior Research Fellow, and Vinod Venkatraman, associate professor of marketing and the Washburn Research Fellow, set out to understand how marketers should time their advertisements, and what type of advertisements work best in a sporting event context. They also worked alongside Siddharth Bhattacharya, a former Ph.D. student from Fox, and Heather Kennedy, a former Ph.D. student from Temple's School of Sport, Tourism and Hospitality Management."

An experiment with more than 600 participants used a custom mobile app while participants solved anagram puzzles and watched an NFL game on TV. Greater engagement with the NFL broadcast correlated with increased recall of mobile advertisements shown during the viewing. Ad memorability improved when ads were timed relative to the event, when ad content matched the surrounding environment, and when the ad was physically closer to the source of distraction. The study examined dual-task interference to identify practical factors advertisers can use to increase effectiveness in distracted, multi-screen environments.

Read at Phys