In the age of smart phones, tablets and laptops, distractions are everywhere. As more screens compete for our attention, advertisers are struggling to deliver ads that cut through the noise. But new research from suggests that certain advertisements might actually land better with distracted consumers.
For their latest research, , professor of management information systems and the Schaefer Senior Research Fellow, and , associate professor of marketing and the Washburn Research Fellow, set out to understand how marketers should time their advertisements, and what type of advertisements work best in a sporting event context. They also worked alongside Siddharth Bhattacharya, a former PhD student from Fox, and Heather Kennedy, a former PhD student from 51Թ’s .
The group presented their findings in “” published in MIS Quarterly on July 22, 2025.
Through an experimental study, the researchers found that the more a participant engaged with an NFL game they were watching on TV, the more likely they were to remember advertisements being shown to them on a mobile device.
They also identified a few factors that made an advertisement more likely to stick with a distracted consumer, such as when the advertisement is shown, the similarity between the advertisement and the consumer’s environment, and even the physical distance between the advertisement and the distraction, the NFL game in this case.
To test this, the researchers created a custom app for the more than 600 participants in which they solved an anagram puzzle while occasionally being served pop-up ads. The participants were also asked to simultaneously watch a 14-minute clip of an NFL game on TV.
Participants were told that they would be evaluated on the number of anagrams they solved and the amount of information about the football game that they retained. The researchers were also, secretly, testing the participants on the number of advertisements they recalled.
They found that timing plays a key role in whether a distracted consumer remembers an advertisement or not.
The best time to advertise was immediately following a major event, like a touchdown in an NFL game. The researchers explained that this is because viewers are riding a high of excitement after something interesting happens in the game, and that momentum forces the viewer to concentrate better on other things happening in their environment, even an advertisement.
“Sometimes if you’re engaging in multiple activities, one activity can, rather than just purely distract you, also increase the amount of attention that you pay,” said. “When the touchdown is being scored, you’re still distracted, obviously, and you’re not looking at your mobile device. But immediately following that you get this boost in attention, rather than a loss in attention.”
Advertisers can piggyback on that momentum to serve ads that stick with consumers, he added. The researchers found that when ads appeared during the less pressing moments following a highlight play, like during a replay or announcer commentary, advertisement recall rate increased by 12.85–16.2%.
Another important factor is congruence, or similarity, between the type of ad shown and the environment of the consumer. Advertisements that incorporate sports themes or personalities are more likely to be remembered by consumers watching a sporting event. The researchers found that advertisement recall rate increased by 29.9% when the ads were congruent with football, compared to advertisements with no connection to the NFL.
They also found that the physical distance between the advertisement and the distraction (NFL game) influenced whether participants remembered an advertisement. They designed a second experiment mimicking the first, except the NFL game was displayed on the same screen as the anagram puzzle and push notifications in a split-screen setup. They found that advertisement recall rate increased by 11.4% when participants did not have to distribute their attention between two different screens.
“What’s interesting here is we see that people find it easier to split attention when the advertisement and distraction are really close to each other,” Venkatraman said. “When there’s a larger distance between the screen on which you’re watching the sporting event and where the ads are being presented, then that attention is more diffused because you have longer distance to travel between the screens.”
Wattal said that advertisers already work hard to make their advertisements hyper personal and hyper contextualized, but the research suggests that advertisers should go a step further and also consider the environment of the consumer.
“Traditionally, if you’re advertising on TV, you make the ad contextually relevant to what’s happening on the TV. Or if you advertise on the mobile device, you make it contextually relevant to what the person is doing on the device,” said. “But what we see is that’s not enough. Advertisers can also look at the overall environment in which that person is situated. And knowing about that environment can be used to create better ads.”