We investigate whether social shows—television programs with high levels of online chatter—are beneficial for advertisers.
Television viewers are increasingly engaging in media-multitasking while ...watching programming. One prevalent multiscreen activity is the simultaneous consumption of television alongside social media chatter about the programming, an activity referred to as “social TV.” Although online interactions with programming can result in a more engaged and committed audience, social TV activities may distract media multitaskers from advertisements. These competing outcomes of social TV raise the question: are programs with high online social TV activity, so called “social shows,” good for advertisers? In this research, we empirically examine this question by exploring the relationship among television advertising, social TV, online traffic, and online sales. Specifically, we investigate how the volume of program-related online chatter is related to online shopping behavior at retailers that advertise during the programs. We find that advertisements that air in programs with more social TV activity see increased ad responsiveness in terms of subsequent online shopping behavior. This result varies with the mood of the advertisement, with more affective advertisements—in particular, funny and emotional advertisements—seeing the largest increases in online shopping activity. Our results shed light on how advertisers can encourage online shopping activity on their websites in the age of multiscreen consumers.
Data and the online appendix are available at
https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2018.1139
.
Political advertising is controversial, as there is widespread concern about money from political action committees (PACs and super PACs) distorting the democratic process. Studying advertising ...effectiveness is, however, a challenging topic for several reasons, including the endogenous nature of fundraising and ad spending rates. However, the extensive use of targeting based on designated marketing areas (DMAs) creates a setting in which neighboring counties with comparable demographics receive different levels of advertising exposure. In this paper, we leverage these advertising discontinuities along DMA borders to study the relative effectiveness of political advertising on vote shares and turnout rates in 2010 and 2012 senatorial elections. We find that negative advertising sponsored by PACs is significantly less effective than that sponsored by candidates in affecting two-party vote shares and voter turnout. A 1% increase in negative advertising by the candidate produces a significant 0.015% lift in the candidate’s unconditional vote shares. By contrast, negative advertising from PACs is ineffective in increasing its supported candidate’s unconditional vote share. Further analysis reveals that the competitiveness of races moderates the effectiveness of political advertising, providing implications for those managing candidates’ campaigns, PACs, and super PACs.
Data and the online appendix are available at
https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2017.1079
.
When defection is unobserved, latent attrition models provide useful insights about customer behavior and accurate forecasts of customer value. Yet extant models ignore direct marketing efforts. ...Response models incorporate the effects of direct marketing, but because they ignore latent attrition, they may lead firms to waste resources on inactive customers.
We propose a parsimonious model that allows direct marketing to impact three relevant behaviors in latent attrition models-the frequency with which customers conduct transactions, the size of the transactions, and the duration for which customers remain active. Our model also accounts for how the organization targets its direct marketing across individuals and over time.
Using donation data from a nonprofit organization, we find that direct marketing increases donation incidence for active donors. However, our analysis also shows that direct marketing has the potential to shorten the length of a donor's relationship. We find that our proposed model offers superior predictive performance compared with models that ignore the impact of direct marketing activity or latent attrition. We demonstrate the managerial applicability of our modeling approach by estimating the impact of direct marketing on donation behavior and identifying those donors most likely to conduct transactions in the future.
In this research, we investigate the relationship between television advertising and online word-of-mouth (WOM) by examining the joint consumption of television programming and production of social ...media by television viewers, termed social TV. We explore how television advertising impacts the volume of online WOM about advertised brands and about the programs in which the advertisements air. We also examine what encourages or discourages viewers to engage in this particular social TV activity. Using data containing television advertising instances and the volume of minute-by-minute social media mentions, our analyses reveal that television advertising impacts the volume of online WOM for both the brand advertised
and
the program in which the advertisement airs. We additionally find that the programs that receive the most online WOM are not necessarily the best programs for advertisers interested in online engagement for their brands. Finally, our results highlight the brand, advertisement, and program characteristics that can encourage or discourage social TV activity. We discuss the implications of our findings for media planning strategies and advertisement design strategies.
Data, as supplemental material, are available at
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2016.1002
.
...search engines actively discourage this black hat SEO practice, referred to as content spinning. ...the content that is most relevant to a particular application - the currently top-performing ...websites based on their search results - is fairly limited. While the content might look natural to a reader, it hasn't been engineered to perform well with search engines. ...we developed a middle-ground approach by dynamically fine-tuning an existing LLM based on a given search query. The substantial reduction in costs from automating more routine tasks allows human contributors to focus their efforts on higher-value tasks like tailoring content to a specific brand's narrative or unique proposition.
We investigate the relationship between product placement in television programs and the volume of social media activity and website traffic for the featured brand.
Advertisers are growing ...increasingly concerned about the ease with which traditional television advertising can be avoided. Product placement activities, where brands are visually and/or verbally incorporated into television and movies, have continued to grow. In contrast to television commercials that can be avoided by viewers, product placement is embedded in the programming itself and is more difficult to avoid. Despite its popularity, there is limited research in marketing that has investigated the impact of product placement. In this research, the authors investigate the relationship between product placement in television programs and the volume of social media activity and website traffic for the featured brand. Using data on nearly 3,000 product placements for 99 brands from the fall 2015 television season, the authors find that prominent product placement activities—especially verbal placements—are associated with increases in both online conversations and web traffic for the brand, with some evidence of decreasing returns at high levels of prominence. The authors also find that, for most placement modalities, television advertising occurring in close proximity to placement activities does not enhance these increases in online viewer engagement.
Data files and the online appendix are available at
https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2018.1147
.
Marketers are adopting increasingly sophisticated ways to engage with customers throughout their journeys. We extend prior perspectives on the customer journey by introducing the role of digital ...signals that consumers emit throughout their activities. We argue that the ability to detect and act on consumer digital signals is a source of competitive advantage for firms. Technology enables firms to collect, interpret, and act on these signals to better manage the customer journey. While some consumers’ desire for privacy can restrict the opportunities technology provides marketers, other consumers’ desire for personalization can encourage the use of technology to inform marketing efforts. We posit that this difference in consumers’ willingness to emit observable signals may hinge on the strength of their relationship with the firm. We next discuss factors that may shift consumer preferences and consequently affect the technology-enabled opportunities available to firms. We conclude with a research agenda that focuses on consumers, firms, and regulators.
Blockchain technology is having an increasingly profound impact on the business landscape. Blockchain—a means for storing information and transactions in secure, decentralized manner—has many ...potential applications for marketing. However, marketing research and practice are still tentative about the use of blockchain and are yet to fully understand it and embrace it. The goal of this editorial is to advance in this direction and offer a path toward incorporating blockchain technology into our scholarly marketing thinking. We review the basic terminology and principles of the blockchain process, provide a comprehensive overview of the potential impact of blockchain on several core marketing areas and propose research questions that can help advance both research and practice as this technology develops.
This editorial is accompanied by five research notes written by leading marketing scholars, which explore applications of blockchain to the following marketing topics: Advertising (Joo et al., 2022), Branding (Colicev, 2022), Creative Industries (Malik et al., 2022), Pricing (Zhang, 2022), and Privacy (Marthews & Tucker, 2022).
Dynamic customer targeting is a common task for marketers actively managing customer relationships. Such efforts can be guided by insight into the return on investment from marketing interventions, ...which can be derived as the increase in the present value of a customer's expected future transactions. Using the popular latent attrition framework, one could estimate this value by manipulating the levels of a set of nonstationary covariates. The authors propose such a model that incorporates transaction-specific attributes and maintains standard assumptions of unobserved heterogeneity. They demonstrate how firms can approximate an upper bound on the appropriate amount to invest in retaining a customer and demonstrate that this amount depends on customers' past purchase activity—namely, the recency and frequency of past customer purchases. Using data from a business-to-business service provider as their empirical application, the authors apply the model to estimate the revenue the service provider loses when it fails to deliver a customer's requested level of service. They also show that the lost revenue is larger than the corresponding expected gain that would result from exceeding a customer's requested level of service. The authors discuss the implications of their findings for marketers in terms of managing customer relationships.
Multiservice providers, such as telecommunication and financial service companies, can benefit from understanding how customers' service portfolios evolve over the course of their relationships. This ...can provide guidance for managerial issues such as customer valuation and predicting customers' future behavior, whether it is acquiring additional services, selectively dropping current services, or ending the relationship entirely. In this research, we develop a dynamic hidden Markov model to identify latent states that govern customers' affinity for the available services through which customers evolve. In addition, we incorporate and demonstrate the importance of separating two other sources of dynamics: portfolio inertia and service stickiness. We then examine the relationship between state membership and managerially relevant metrics, including customers' propensities for acquiring additional services or terminating the relationship, and customer lifetime value. Through a series of illustrative vignettes, we show that customers who have discarded a particular service may have an increased risk of canceling all services in the near future (as intuition would suggest) but also may be more prone to acquire more services, a provocative finding of interest to service providers. Our findings also emphasize the need to look beyond the previous period, as in much current research, and consider how customers have evolved over their
entire
relationship in order to predict their future actions.
This paper was accepted by Pradeep Chintagunta, marketing.
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