Gumilevskaya, Sofia; (2025) How personal relevance influences advertising effectiveness: a cognitive, affective, and neural perspective. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Personalised advertising is now a defining feature of the media landscape. Personalisation acknowledges the uniqueness of each consumer by tailoring content to their preferences, behaviours, or identity. In advertising, this strategy is often assumed to enhance effectiveness by increasing personal relevance. That is, making content feel more meaningful because it relates to the self. While this has clear commercial value, understanding how personalisation affects consumers on a cognitive and emotional level is equally important, as we are all recipients of these messages. This thesis investigates how personal relevance, along with contextual media factors, shapes advertising effectiveness by examining the mechanisms through which it influences information processing. Chapter 1 outlines the rise of personalised media and reviews theoretical perspectives on self-relevance. Chapter 2 presents a study using self-report, behavioural, and physiological methods to examine how personal relevance and screen size affect audience engagement. Personally relevant ads were preferred and better remembered, while larger screens improved attention and memory recall compared to smaller devices. Chapter 3 used fMRI to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying this “addressability uplift.” Contrary to predictions, there was no consistent evidence that personally relevant ads activated brain regions associated with attention, emotion, memory, or reward. However, ads embedded in viewer-chosen contexts elicited stronger responses in the nucleus accumbens and hippocampus. Chapter 4 offers a further behavioural exploration of how viewing context and age modulate engagement. As age increased, participants showed improved memory for relevant ads in self-selected TV contexts, while younger participants benefitted more in non-self-selected conditions. Together, these studies provide new insight into the dynamic factors that shape the effectiveness of personalised advertising. While personal relevance enhances behavioural engagement, the underlying neural mechanisms remain complex. This thesis highlights the need for a more nuanced, evidence-based approach to personalisation.

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