모바일 광고가 모바일 애플리케이션의 평가에 미치는 영향: 광고 브랜드의 친숙성 및 관련성을 중심으로

Recent expansion in smartphone market has resulted in strong growth of mobile advertising market. Mobile advertisements are useful marketing and promotion tools since they enable marketers to provide personalized and ubiquitous services to customers. In particular, as considerable number of companies develop and distribute their own mobile applications, inserting mobile advertisements into mobile applications has become popular mobile advertising tool. Here, we examine how mobile advertisements placed in a mobile application affect the evaluation about mobile application service providers. Specifically, the interaction effects of advertising brand’s familiarity, contextual relevance of an advertisement, and application provider’s familiarity are investigated. Drawing from spillover effects, advertising intrusiveness theory, and contextual advertising theory, six hypotheses are proposed and tested in two experimental settings. The results show a negative spillover effect from the advertising brands’ familiarity to the application provider. That is, the loyalty and usage intention toward the application provider are higher when the application hosts an advertisement of little-known brand than that of well-known. Moreover, the attitude toward mobile application provider is more positive when it hosts contextual advertisements (when there is contextual relevance between contents and advertising brand). And little-known mobile applications get more benefit by hosting contextual advertisements than do well-known mobile applications. This study provides theoretical implications to academics studying mobile advertising and sheds some light on how mobile application providers could effectively manage advertisements placed in their applications.