EXPRESS: Does Location Familiarity Increase Response to Mobile Ads?

Targeting ads based on consumers’ real-time locations has evolved into a practice worth billions of dollars in the advertising industry. Yet, the implications of repeated mobile ad exposure are poorly understood, primarily due to the confounding effects of locational context. This research seeks to bridge this gap. Using two large datasets comprising more than three million observations from a major European mobile telecommunication company, the authors investigate how ad repetition and location revisits (i.e., returning to a previously visited location) jointly determine consumer response to mobile display advertising. The empirical strategy leverages coarsened exact matching combined with a logit model with fixed effects at the consumer-location level. The results show that the ad click-through rate is more than 26% higher at revisited locations than at locations visited for the first time. However, mobile ad repetition decreases click rates, and this effect is amplified at revisited locations. The results contribute to the theory and practice of mobile advertising.