Mobile Technology and Advertising: Moving the Research Agenda Forward

Abstract

Mobile technology offers advertisers not only an evergrowing global audience of “always-on” multifunctional smartphone capability but also instantaneous access to their contextual information. Location-based, environmental, and behavioral data are increasingly being used to apply novel targeting and creative strategies for the development of new forecasting models. The available evidence suggests there is widespread dissemination and broad acceptance of mobile technology in the marketplace, as well as very promising opportunities for advertisers to engage with their customers in novel ways. In 2021, over 6 billion people worldwide had smartphone subscriptions (Statista 2022b). Not surprisingly, almost 60% of web traffic is accounted for by mobile devices (StatCounter 2022). Accordingly, the evidence suggests that advertisers spend about two-thirds of their digital advertising budget on mobile advertising (eMarketer 2019). Nevertheless, such proliferation in mobile technology has not received significant attention from the advertising research community in comparison to the attention it’s received from marketing scholars. For example, during the past two decades, the Journal of Advertising has published only a few articles that investigated the topic (e.g., Baek and Yoo 2018; Okazaki, Li, and Hirose 2009; Peters, Amato, and Hollenbeck 2007). Moreover, a recent meta-analysis of mobile advertising research includes only three articles published by major advertising journals between 2012 and 2021 (Maseeh et al. 2021). In our view, such a lack of scholarly attention in our community can be attributed to at least two main reasons. First, a shift in mobile advertising research methods from more conventional survey or experimental approaches to a big-data and field experimental approach may have played a role. Over the past decade, mobile (advertising) scholars have increasingly focused on large-scale field data as the backbone for their research. Yet collecting these types of data comes with its own challenges because it usually requires collaboration with industry partners. Field data are also susceptible to increasing consumer privacy protection legislation. Hence, the threshold to obtain high-quality data for mobile advertising research is high. Indeed, according to a methods survey among major advertising journals, only a little over 6% of publications between 2011 and 2015 used market data, such as sales or media ratings (Chang 2017). To sum up: The unique features of mobile technology (e.g., portability, granular location targeting, dynamic environmental factors) are hard to capture with survey or experimental methods, as are commonly used by advertising scholars. Second, while it is widely understood that exposure to mobile advertising and the creation of user-generated content work differently than in nonmobile online media (e.g., Grewal and Stephen 2019; Melumad, Inman, and Pham 2019), our theoretical understanding of mobile advertising remains underdeveloped. Most studies are grounded in theories from existent online advertising research without fully accounting for the complexities of the mobile advertising landscape. This is also reflected by commentators from industry who have indicated that new contextual insights such as location data are among the most misunderstood areas in marketing (Adweek 2018), with advertisers still struggling to harness insights effectively (Forbes 2019). This Journal of Advertising special section, Mobile Technology and Advertising, intends to address some of the issues related to the underrepresentation of mobile advertising research in advertising journals by kickstarting the conversation around this exciting field of research. In doing so, this special section aims to extend our current knowledge of the topic by taking a broader and more current approach to these newly