Abstract

Mobile advertising has become the fifth media following newspapers, radio, TV, and the Internet. It provides companies and ad agencies with a new channel for low-cost and quick marketing communication. This study delivers a teaser ad via mobile Short Message Service (SMS), also referred to as text messaging, to test whether mobile advertising is an effective channel for teaser advertising. The authors focus on the construct of consumer curiosity and conduct two experiments to investigate the effects of possible curiosity clues, including brand familiarity, ad interactivity, the degree of personalization, and incentives, on the curious responses of consumers. The experimental results reveal the following. (1) Brand familiarity and ad interactivity positively affect “what people already know,” thus reducing the information gap. (2) The degree of personalization and incentives in ads have a positive impact on “what people want to know”; however, only the former clearly expands the information gap. (3) The size of information gap and curiosity intensity have an inverted-U relationship. A medium-sized information gap could lead to greater curiosity than a big-sized or a small-sized gap. Moreover, big-sized and bigger-sized information gaps generate similar curious responses. The implication of these and other findings are discussed.  

Keywords

SMS advertising teaser advertising curiosity