Similarity attraction-based mobile advertising: designing and testing

Abstract

This study explores the possibility of applying the sociopsychological phenomenon known as similarity attraction to the creation of more customized and persuasive mobile advertising without privacy concerns, and for this purpose, we develop two applications, SensPlus and PerAds. While the SensPlus app accumulates the smartphone usage profiles of participants and constructs a regression model to predict their personality, the PerAds app presents user-created content according to the user's personality. The participants' response to a smartphone ad is measured in terms of invitation acceptance of the cherry blossom festival and classical music concert. The χ2 statistics imply participants respond differentially to the various types of smartphone ads according to the similarity between the personalities of the user and ad types. Our results indicate that the socio-psychological phenomenon can be introduced into practical application by replacing the personality trait factors with the smartphone usage pattern.