Assessing Audiences’ Satisfaction of Advertising Digital-Billboard: A U & G Theoretical Perspective

Abstract

The professional act of advertising is never completed without assessing it effectiveness on brand awareness, return on investment, and audience feedback. The new pervading digital billboards have been posing some dissimilarity to audiences’ gratification and satisfaction of advertisement billboards. Uses and Gratification theory is a functionalist theory, applicable to articulate audiences’ satisfaction and gratification of a mass media. Employing the perspective of Uses and Gratification theory, this study examine the association between some of the extant and related U&G theory’s constructs (digitalization, informativeness and irritation) and audience gratification of digital billboards and explore the moderating effect of digital billboards’ location the relationship between irritation and audiences’ digital billboards gratification. 119 students were randomly selected from the Northern University of Malaysia and filled the developed and administered questionnaire. Correlation and Hierarchical regression are the main statistical tools used to test the study’s hypotheses. The result shows there is a statistically significant relationship between digitalization of bill-boards and digital bill-boards informativeness, and audience satisfaction. No statistical relationship between irritation and audience satisfaction. It was found that after the introduction of location to the relationship between irritation and audience satisfaction was significant. This study contributed practically to explain the possible effects, potentials and efficiencies of the evolving digital billboards, and theoretically exposed the adoptability of Uses and Gratification theoretical perspective in understanding digital billboards audiences and introduces location as a significant factor to audiences’ irritation and satisfaction of digital bill-boards. The implication of the study is discussed and future studies are recommended on the basis of this study’s limitations.

Keywords: Audience Satisfaction, Digitalization, Digital Bill-boards, Location