An Experimental Analysis of the Effectiveness of Multi-Screen Advertising

Multiscreening refers to consumers’ simultaneous usage of multiple screen-based devices. Prior research has shown that simultaneous multiscreening distracts consumers and hinders cognitive processing. In this paper, we evaluate whether and how simultaneous multiscreening can harm advertising effectiveness. Moreover, we test under which conditions an additional mobile advertising impression can moderate the effect of multiscreening on advertising effectiveness. We test the impact of multiscreening via different screen-based devices in two experiments. We find that multiscreening decreases advertising effectiveness and show that an additional mobile advertising impression of the same brand can attenuate the effect, but only when the additional mobile advertisement does not lead to high levels of distraction from the desktop advertisement.