Columbia University researchers
have just published a study into the effectiveness of mobile adverts and come to some conclusions that may bode well for people who worry their smartphones will someday be yet another vector for annoying marketing. Turns out, adverts for many products are ineffective on mobile devices.
MDA campaigns that ran between 2007 and 2010 and involved 39,946 consumers show that MDA campaigns significantly increased consumers' favorable attitudes and purchase intentions only when the campaigns advertised products that were higher (vs. lower) involvement and utilitarian (vs. hedonic).
They are most effective when a product is either practical or are something that takes thought and investigation before making a purchase. Furthermore:
- Mobile ads do work for products that have a practical and important use, like a lawn mower or a washing machine
- Mobile ads do work for high-involvement products (a lot of time, thought and energy is placed into the decision, like a family car).
- Mobile ads don't work for just-for-pleasure items, like fancy watches
- Mobile ads don't work for low-involvement purchases like movie tickets or toothbrush (ones that pose a low risk to the buyer)
The study's abstract is available here.
Most ads that follow me around the internet these days are for things I've already bought. I picked up a surf watch a couple of weeks ago. Now everywhere I go the sidebar advertisement is for a (different) surfwatch. Fuck off, pal, I already bought one. Secondly, I went to wordreference.com to look up how to say "surgical stapler" in French (my dog has liver cancer and the vets speak French here). Suddenly, everywhere I go, Google is helpfully showing me adverts for staplers, the kind you'd see in an office.
That's two fails. I'm glad to see they're looking into mobile ads. I hope they discover eventually that adverts on phones are a huge waste of time. If the conclusion is otherwise, your phone is about to become a nuisance in ways previously unimaginable, like that crap where you walk by a coffee shop and your device buzzes you with a coupon for that store. Again, fuck off, pal!