Bringing together what belongs together: Effects of matching ads to situations rather than to individuals.

Situational targeting is a promising and privacy friendly way to increase the effectiveness of advertisements purely based on contextual information. We present the results of a study designed to measure the impact of semantic congruence between a beer advertisement and a video clip on different advertisement measures, such as willingness to pay (WTP), attitude towards the brand (ATTB) or recall of the brand. The results indicate that semantic congruence implies a trade-off between improved ATTB and higher WTP for the product at the cost of lowered brand recall. We find that the effects on ATTB and WTP are only significant, when advertisement and video are being played at the same time, while recall is impaired in all conditions. The results further show that advertisements targeted towards beer drinkers only yield a positive impact on WTP and recall in case there is semantic congruence between ad and clip. Our results contribute to research on the economic impact of advertising and evaluate an alternative form of adaptive advertising, targeted to situations rather than to individuals