Memory at Play: Personalizing Online Advertisements Based on Consumers’ Autobiographical Memory

Abstract

Targeted advertising promises to increase relevance to consumers, but risks backfiring if it seems overly intrusive. In the present study, we examined whether personalizing online advertisements based on one’s autobiographical memory can foster positive reactions toward the advertisement. In two experiments, participants went through a fictitious social media website where they recalled a special memory and then saw an advertisement that was or was not personalized based upon their memory. Results demonstrate that personalized advertisements elicited favorable reactions toward the advertisement via enhanced feeling of nostalgia, but did not show an influence on positive affect or perceived intrusiveness.

Keywords:

• personalization
• autobiographical memory
• online advertising
• contextual relevance
• positive affect
• nostalgia
• perceived intrusiveness

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank our study participants for taking their time to participate in our study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In both Study 1 and Study 2, an additional factor, product imagery, was included as a way to further generate nostalgic reflections and favorable consumer evaluations. However, the multiple group analysis in AMOS showed the paths reported in Figures 1 and 2 were not significantly different between conditions for all but one mediating path (positive emotions in Study 1). Thus, we focus on the personalization factor in this paper.

2 In both Study 1 and Study 2, we performed multiple regression analyses to check if there existed multicollinearity where ad outcomes explained by nostalgia could be linearly predicted from positive affect. For both sets of data, the collinearity diagnostics revealed the variance inflations factors (VIF) not exceeding 4, which suggest the absence of multicollinearity due to correlation between positive affect and nostalgia. Also, we tested the measurement model between positive affect and nostalgia using data for both studies, and model fits suggest that despite significant correlations between positive affect and nostalgia (Study 1: r = .47, p < .001; Study 2: r = .39, p < .001), these two variables should be treated as distinct emotional feelings in predicting advertising outcomes.

3 While we argue that positive affect and nostalgia should operate individually to influence advertising effectiveness in our study context, past research did not rule out the possibility of nostalgia leading to positive emotion, which results in more favorable advertising outcomes. Therefore, we also tested alternative models establishing the path from nostalgia to positive affect as shown in Appendix A. However, model fits were less well-fitting than our proposed models, and the relationship between nostalgia and positive affect was not significant for both studies. Therefore, we consider these alternative models as less fitted to our data.