Debunking the science of advertising

What's Advertising Content Worth? Evidence from a Consumer Credit Marketing Field Experiment^*

Abstract. Firms spend billions of dollars developing advertising content, yet there is little field evidence on how much or how it affects demand. We analy

The $2.43 Billion Question: Podcast Advertising in 2024

An immersive data story exploring podcast advertising trends and the breaking point where ads drive audiences away.

I truly hate mostpeopleslop

In 2006, Joe Sugarman published a book called The Adweek Copywriting Handbook - and an axiom stuck... "The sole purpose of the first sentence in an advertisement is to get you to read the second sentence." That line, more or less, explains how social media turned into a pile of

The Real Money In Modern ‘Journalism’ Now Involves Filling The Internet With ‘AI’-Generated Garbage

Last year both Gannett and Sports Illustrated were caught creating fake, “AI” generated journalists to create fake, plagiarism and mistake-prone “journalism.” In both instances …

What can news publishers learn from creators? Interview with Simon Owens

Don't leave money on the table and think outside the box about business models

The Truth About Social Media as an "Advertising Industry," Bluesky's Gamble, and "Reclaiming Conversation" - Nightflight

Selling the American People: Advertising, Optimization, and the Origins of Adtech

How marketers learned to dream of optimization and speak in the idiom of management science well before the widespread use of the Internet.Algorithms, data

“Paging Dr. Fraud”: The Fake Publishers That Are Ruining Science

For years, spurious journals have proliferated online, promising academic credibility in exchange for cash.

How Social Media Rewards Misinformation

A majority of false stories are spread by a small number of frequent users, suggests a new study co-authored by Yale SOM’s Gizem Ceylan. But they can be taught to change their ways.

Broken by Design - Ad Tech and What We Can Do About It

This is the first banner ad. Created for an AT&T advertising campaign in 1994 by Wired Magazine it is perhaps the most influential thing to ever happen to the internet. No single thing has done more to change, deform, alter, or make sustainable the web. When it launched, it had a 44% CTR - that’s...

Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show

Meta projected 10% of its 2024 revenue would come from ads for scams and banned goods.

“CEO said a thing!”

A blistering guide to what lazy journalism too often looks like

Advertising as a Reminder: Evidence from the Dutch State Lottery

We show that advertising can act as a reminder for consumers who intend to buy a product. , Consumers who intend to buy a product may forget to do so because they suffer from limited attention. Therefore, they may value being reminded by an advertisement. This reminder effect of advertising could be important in many markets but is usually difficult to document. We study it in the context of buying a product that has existed for almost 300 years: a ticket for the Dutch State Lottery. This context is particularly suitable for our analysis because the product is simple, it is very well known, and there are multiple fixed and known purchase cycles per year. Moreover, radio and TV advertisements are designed explicitly to remind consumers to buy a lottery ticket before the draw. This can conveniently be done online. We develop an approach to distinguish reminder effects of advertising from other effects, such as conveying information about the size of the jackpot. The key idea is that reminder effects are short lived. We use minute-level advertising and online sales data and find that the reminder effect of advertising is strong. Reaching 1% of the population by a radio advertisement leads to an increase in online sales of 1.55% in the four hours after the advertisement is aired. For TV advertisements, the increase is 0.78%. We show that the effects generally last longer for radio advertisements. We also provide direct evidence that reminding consumers not only affects the timing of purchases but also leads to market expansion. Finally, we estimate a model of consumer behavior under limited attention to quantify the effect on total sales. We find that total sales would be 16.7% lower without the reminder effect of advertising and that shifting advertising to the week of the draw would lead to a 9.2% increase in sales. History: Puneet Manchanda served as the senior editor and Günter Hitsch served as associate editor for this article. Supplemental Material: A replication package with code and log files and an Online Appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2022.1405 .

“You Will:” A Macroeconomic Analysis of Digital Advertising

Abstract. An information-based model is developed where traditional and digital advertising finance the provision of free media goods and affect price comp