Finding relevance in smartphone advertising

Smartphone ads compete for the user’s attention, which is initially intended to focus on other areas of the small screen of the device. Despite this competition, smartphone advertisements aim to produce as much cognitive reward as possible in exchange for the mental effort expended in their processing, that is, they aim at the audience’s relevance, as claimed by relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995), a theory in which cyberpragmatics (Yus 2011) is rooted. This paper addresses several key qualities of effective smartphone advertising from a cyberpragmatics perspective that focuses on possible sources of relevance of online communication, and now applied to smartphone ads. Furthermore, it is claimed that today’s smartphone-based advertising cannot be accounted for pragmatically without the incorporation of key terms such as contextual constraint and non-propositional effect, which add to more traditional pragmatic accounts of online communication (Yus 2017a, 2021a).