Effects of watermark and music on mobile message advertisements

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2006.04.003Get rights and content

Abstract

The development of mobile telecommunication has made breakthrough advances in recent years. Compared to the Internet, mobile telecommunications has anywhere, anytime and always online characteristics. As growth in the Internet advertising market continues, mobile advertising has attracted attention. In this research, the effectiveness of two types of mobile message advertisements, watermarks and music are studied and compared. Two experiments were carried out to test four proposed hypotheses. The independent variable in experiment 1 was the watermark transparency (20%, 40% and 60%). The independent variable in experiment 2 was the music format with five levels: no music, vocal and instrumental version at high volume, vocal and instrumental version at low volume, instrumental version at high volume and instrumental version at low volume. The results showed that the watermarks transparency and format were effective in mobile advertising. The 60% watermark was found better than the 20% and 40% watermarks. The 40% watermark was found better than the 20% watermark for advertisement recall only. Music and vocal/instrumental music versions were effective in mobile advertisements. The vocal music version was found effective in mobile advertising. Music with both vocal and instrumental versions was more effective in advertisement recall than instrumental music for mobile device users.

Introduction

With the development of high-speed wireless networking and various types of mobile devices, mobile computing has become widely accepted and applied. The number of wireless Internet users worldwide is expected to increase exponentially. Wireless technology will represent a major opportunity. The mobile device market could grow potentially larger than today's computer industry because of the dynamic and multi-functional design capability and utility. Over time, the mobile industry has moved from text messages to icons and picture messages to photographs. Wallpaper, ring tones, video messages and movie previews can be downloaded onto a mobile device. The important technologies underlying these new services and applications are enhanced messaging service (EMS) and multimedia messaging service (MMS) (Mobile Streams, 2001). This evolution in messaging from text to full multimedia is a significant and fundamental change. In this transition, short messaging service (SMS) is to mobile phones what DOS was to PCs whereas MMS is to mobile phones what Windows was to the PC.

The growth of mobile advertising has attracted attention. One of the important factors in the growth of mobile advertising has been if people will accept, or reject, advertising on their mobile devices. Advertisers must make mobile advertising more information intensive and receptive. Images, multimedia and animation must be considered in new mobile advertising forms to give customers a fresh feeling. However, mobile information access must cope with mobile environment problems and restrictions such as display size, battery, memory size, processing power, narrow bandwidth and restricted resources. The user interface of mobile devices is very different from that in computers in terms of input device, output device, computing capability, system architecture and utilities. With a small-sized display, the user will have difficulty initially in acquiring the information before activating a mental model for interpreting the information. The user will also have difficulty placing the information within their existing mental model as he/she browses the information (Albers and Kim, 2000).

Advertisements provide users useful information, creativity and junk information. Unwanted advertisements can be very annoying for mobile phone users as junk mails to internet users. However, many internet users subscribe e-newsletters and many mobile phone users can do so as well. Some e-newsletters or mobile messages can be considered as advertisements providing useful information, such as restaurants and movies. Some unexpected but useful advertisements may come along with subscribed information. The unexpected advertisements can be accepted by users if they do not disturb the subscribed information too much or they are creative. The design of mobile advertisements should balance the support in users’ goals and the commercial goals. The object of this research is to assess the impact of the advertising messages upon the users’ task performance and to investigate the effectiveness of two advertising forms, the watermark and music, on mobile message advertising. One watermark factor (transparency) and three music factors (music/no music, volume and vocal/instrumental) are studied.

Section snippets

Internet advertisements

Advertising on the Internet is a big business with big opportunities. For advertisers, the first form for online promotions was the web site. This was followed by advertising that brought users from publishers’ web sites to advertisers’ web sites (Zeff and Aronson, 1997). Zeff and Aronson (1997) divided Internet advertising into two kinds: advertising that spread through the e-mail system and advertising posted through the www system. The www advertising included classified advertising, banner

Hypotheses

This research investigated the effectiveness of two new mobile advertising forms, the watermark and music, in task performance and advertising processed on handheld devices for mobile commerce (Fig. 1). The effect of watermark on task performance and mobile advertising was measured using performance time, advertisements recall, attitude toward the advertisement and brand attitude. The music effect on task performance and mobile advertisement was measured using the performance time and

Results and discussion

Before testing the hypotheses, all of the collected data were checked for model adequacy. The data were transformed if the model adequacy did not hold. Nonparametric analysis was conducted if the model adequacy was not held after transformation. The internal consistencies for the questionnaire responses, using Cronbach's α, were 0.8394 for the advertisement attitude questionnaire and 0.9003 for the brand attitude questionnaire.

Conclusions

The purpose of this study was to assess the impact of the advertising messages upon the users’ task performance and to investigate the effectiveness of two new mobile advertising forms, watermark and music, on mobile message advertisements. This study found that the watermark transparency was effective in mobile advertising. Music and vocal/instrumental music versions were effective in mobile advertisements. The implication that watermarks can present different types but related information at

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