Everyday multiscreening: How the simultaneous usage of multiple screens affects information processing and advertising effectiveness

Today, people have access to a variety of screens, such as a television, laptop, smartphone, and tablet. Screen saturation and the convergence of these technologies have led to an increase in combining different screens simultaneously, also known as multiscreening. With so many new devices and screens competing for people’s attention, they continue to be distracted. Even though distractions in the form of different screens are ever present, it is still relatively unknown how multiscreening affects information processing and advertising effectiveness compared to single screening. Therefore, the aim of this dissertation is to disentangle the phenomenon of multiscreening and how it affects information processing and advertising effectiveness by: 1) exploring the phenomenon of multiscreening in daily life, 2) examining how multiscreening affects advertising outcomes, and 3) examining the facilitating role of task relevance. This dissertation consists of three parts in line with these three objectives. In total, this dissertation consists of one literature review and four empirical papers, all based on different datasets. This dissertation shows that multiscreening is ingrained into people’s daily lives and it impacts the way people process media content. Moreover, it shows that media messages never stand alone; the way a message is processed can be influenced by the use of additional screens and even media content that is shown on these additional screens. Finally, this dissertation shows that multiscreening is not only detrimental to information processing and advertising effectiveness, but there are some things media content developers can do to facilitate this process