Acceptance of mobile advertising by consumers in public service institutions in Lagos, Nigeria
| Date | 04 April 2016 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/EL-09-2014-0169 |
| Pages | 265-288 |
| Published date | 04 April 2016 |
| Author | Williams Ezinwa Nwagwu,Bunmi Famiyesin |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
Acceptance of mobile advertising
by consumers in public service
institutions in Lagos, Nigeria
Williams Ezinwa Nwagwu and Bunmi Famiyesin
Africa Regional Centre for Information Science, University of Ibadan,
Ibadan, Nigeria
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the acceptance of mobile advertising by
consumers in public service institutions in Lagos Nigeria from the perspective of non-permission-based
nature of advertising practice in Nigeria.
Design/methodology/approach – Guided by the theory of reasoned action, data were collected from
389 respondents in a sample survey using a structured questionnaire, and the variables were measured
on ordinal scale.
Findings – The respondents reported that the mobile advertising is informative; they also strongly
agreed that the media is ubiquitous but irritating. Attitude of consumers towards mobile advertising,
behavioural control and subjective norm have correlations with acceptance. Irritation and
informativeness signicantly and positively predicted acceptance of mobile advertising, while
credibility and ubiquity predicted acceptance of the technology negatively. Age has a negative
relationship with acceptance; both gender (male ⫽1) and tertiary education have a signicant
relationship with acceptance of mobile advertising just as marital status.
Research limitations/implications – The study focused only on public service mobile consumers
in Lagos, Nigeria.
Practical implications – Mobile adverts are ubiquitous in Nigeria, but consumers do not trust or use
the adverts, although they consider them informative. The telecomm regulatory body needs to control
deployment of mobile technologies for produce and service ads, so that ads will be subject to individual
choices and discretion, and thereby reducing the ubiquity and increase the trust consumers have on the
strategy.
Social implications – There is hype that mobile advert has penetrated Nigerian market,
but the strategy is not credulous to the people.
Originality/value – There is no study focusing on the acceptance of this ad strategy in the public
service sector in Nigeria.
Keywords Nigeria, Telecommunications, Mobile phones, Mobile advertising
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Advertising practices have changed rapidly since the expansion of digital technologies
in the 1990s. A typical example of these technologies is mobile technology, which offers
richer possibilities to reach and interact with people at an individual level (Tanner and
The authors wish to thank the staff of local government areas in Lagos state, Nigeria, for
cooperating and completing the questionnaire; they also acknowledge the anonymous referees for
their inputs.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
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Acceptance of
mobile
advertising by
consumers
265
Received 21 September 2014
Revised 9 January 2015
Accepted 24 April 2015
TheElectronic Library
Vol.34 No. 2, 2016
pp.265-288
©Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0264-0473
DOI 10.1108/EL-09-2014-0169
Raymond, 2010;Thorbjornsrud et al., 2014;Varaprasad, 2014). Mobile devices facilitate
accurate targeting of prospective clients, as well as the distribution of highly
personalised content. According to Lawer and Knox (2006), mobile advertisements
generally enable people to make a quick comparison of products and their prices before
purchasing decisions are made. The most popular mobile advertising medium is the
mobile phone. Chang and Villegas (2008) argued that the mobile phone has a
tremendous potential for delivering advertisements because of its high penetration rate.
Depending on the capacity of the mobile phone, people can receive digital photographs,
moving images, text messages and high-quality audio. Mobile SIM card technology
facilitates the exact identication of each mobile phone and, therefore, its user. The
mobile phone offers a bidirectional and individual connection to the consumer, and this
makes it a highly interactive advertising channel (Park et al., 2008). In fact, the mobile
phone is an advertising media that consumers carry with them everywhere they go,
thereby extending the time and space opportunities of mobile advertising over
traditional mass media advertising. Mobile phones are, thus, an ideal, exible and ready
medium for direct and personalised communication with customers.
The telecommunications industry in Nigeria has grown rapidly with a consequent
explosion in the number of mobile phone users (Nigerian Communications Commission,
2013). This development has expanded the channels for businesses to offer a variety of
personalised services through the mobile phone. According to InMobi (2012) – the
largest independent mobile advertising network in Africa – there was a 37 per cent
growth of mobile advertising impressions on Nigerian mobile networks for the rst
three months of 2012. InMobi further opined that the large increase in ad impressions
from 5.8 billion in the last quarter of 2011 to over 8 billion in the rst three months of
2012 is clear proof of the rising popularity of the medium in Nigeria, and shows that
marketing professionals and brand managers across the country are increasingly
embracing mobile media as a viable and effective advertising channel. Macleod (2013)
indicated that Nigeria ranks third in the number of mobile banner ads served in the
world, even above the UK.
However, mobile advertising in Nigeria occurs in a manner that is sometimes not in
consonance with best practices – that is, it is not permission-based. Unlike the situation
in many countries, such as South Africa, where advertisers mostly adopt solicited or
permission-based approaches and prospective customers are allowed to exercise
discretion on what they wish to be exposed to, mobile advertisers in Nigeria adopt
unsolicited approaches. Users of mobile phones in Nigeria do not have any discretion
about whether or not they receive information about certain goods and services; instead,
information about every good and service constantly bombards phone owners.
Advertisers simply send information about goods and services to individuals’ mobile
phones, believing that some of the recipients of the advertisement will be prospective
buyers of their goods or services. The most common strategy has been short messaging
services (SMS). A recent and growing trend is that advertisers use recorded calls to
inform mobile subscribers whose numbers they have access to about new products and
services that are available in the market.
It is necessary to understand the attitude and acceptance of consumers towards
mobile advertising, as this understanding could aid in designing policies aimed at
improving advertisement delivery through mobile technology (Chang and Villegas,
2008). As with other interactive advertising, consumer attitudes and intentions towards
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