Issues in cross-cultural studies of advertising audiovisual material

This article presents an approach to cross-cultural studies of advertising audiovisual material that departs from the typical rigid marketing models. It favours a more qualitative inductive approach to corpuses, in which audiovisual texts are not approached or compared through the use of standardised American tools. After reviewing the usual marketing tools, the article focuses on the steps researchers can usefully take, from the gathering of audiovisual texts from two different environments to their classification, two important steps that are critical in such studies

Statistical Arbitrage Mining for Display Advertising

We study and formulate arbitrage in display advertising. Real-Time Bidding (RTB) mimics stock spot exchanges and utilises computers to algorithmically buy display ads per impression via a real-time auction. Despite the new automation, the ad markets are still informationally inefficient due to the heavily fragmented marketplaces. Two display impressions with similar or identical effectiveness (e.g., measured by conversion or click-through rates for a targeted audience) may sell for quite different prices at different market segments or pricing schemes. In this paper, we propose a novel data mining paradigm called Statistical Arbitrage Mining (SAM) focusing on mining and exploiting price discrepancies between two pricing schemes. In essence, our SAMer is a meta-bidder that hedges advertisers' risk between CPA (cost per action)-based campaigns and CPM (cost per mille impressions)-based ad inventories; it statistically assesses the potential profit and cost for an incoming CPM bid request against a portfolio of CPA campaigns based on the estimated conversion rate, bid landscape and other statistics learned from historical data. In SAM, (i) functional optimisation is utilised to seek for optimal bidding to maximise the expected arbitrage net profit, and (ii) a portfolio-based risk management solution is leveraged to reallocate bid volume and budget across the set of campaigns to make a risk and return trade-off. We propose to jointly optimise both components in an EM fashion with high efficiency to help the meta-bidder successfully catch the transient statistical arbitrage opportunities in RTB. Both the offline experiments on a real-world large-scale dataset and online A/B tests on a commercial platform demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed solution in exploiting arbitrage in various model settings and market environments.Comment: In the proceedings of the 21st ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining (KDD 2015

The Use of Trademarks in Empirical Research: Towards an Integrated Framework

This paper represents an early attempt to develop an integrated framework linking empirical studies that make use of trademark statistics. Despite its youth, this field of scholarly activity has already accumulated a critical mass of papers that allow us to draw first general conclusions about the trademark lifecycle and its impact on organisational functioning. Based on a systematic review of 64 articles with some elements of empirical trademark analysis, five broad research areas have been identified, namely: the determinants of trademark deposits; the relationship between trademarks and innovation processes; the role of trademarks in differentiating product offerings; the strategic use of trademarks; and the impact of trademarks on firm performance. Within each category, a more detailed aggregation of articles has also been proposed. Overall, the analysis has shown that the performance-based perspective currently dominates the research landscape, with studies on trademark deposits and the trademark-innovation link to follow. At the same time, there is still little known about micro-foundations of a company's trademarking behaviour; the use of trademarks and other intellectual property rights in a complementary way and its effect on value transference; as well as the performance implications of differentiation strategy. This paper considers these and other findings to outline directions for future research

The Virtual Location of E-Tailers: Evidence from a B2C E-Commerce Market

An Internet retailer?s (e-tailer?s) outstanding virtual location enhances the probability of being noticed by potential customers. The notion of a virtual location for e-tailers refers to the analogy to the physical location. In the empirical analysis, an e-tailer?s Internet search engine rank as well as its advertising activities in search engines serve as proxies for the virtual location. The results suggest that it is optimal for e-tailers to complement a high search engine rank with investments in online advertising. Moreover, banner ads seem to serve as price advertising mechanism, whereas sponsored links rather seem to be used in order to signal outstanding customer service. --virtual location,online advertising,search engines

Advertising, brand loyalty and pricing

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Games and Economic Behavior. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2008 Elsevier B.V.I consider an oligopoly model where, prior to price competition, firms invest in persuasive advertising and induce brand loyalty in consumers who would otherwise buy the cheapest alternative on the market. This setting, in which persuasive advertising is introduced to homogeneous product markets, provides an alternative explanation for price dispersion phenomena. Despite ex ante symmetry, the equilibrium profile of advertising outlays is asymmetric. It follows that endogenously determined brand loyal consumer bases are not symmetric across firms. This raises a robustness question regarding Varian's “model of sales” where symmetry is exogenously assumed.IVI

Is Google the next Microsoft? Competition, Welfare and Regulation in Internet Search

Internet search (or perhaps more accurately `web-search') has grown exponentially over the last decade at an even more rapid rate than the Internet itself. Starting from nothing in the 1990s, today search is a multi-billion dollar business. Search engine providers such as Google and Yahoo! have become household names, and the use of a search engine, like use of the Web, is now a part of everyday life. The rapid growth of online search and its growing centrality to the ecology of the Internet raise a variety of questions for economists to answer. Why is the search engine market so concentrated and will it evolve towards monopoly? What are the implications of this concentration for different `participants' (consumers, search engines, advertisers)? Does the fact that search engines act as `information gatekeepers', determining, in effect, what can be found on the web, mean that search deserves particularly close attention from policy-makers? This paper supplies empirical and theoretical material with which to examine many of these questions. In particular, we (a) show that the already large levels of concentration are likely to continue (b) identify the consequences, negative and positive, of this outcome (c) discuss the possible regulatory interventions that policy-makers could utilize to address these

Search engine advertising in web retailing : an efficiency analysis

This study examines the efficiency of search engine advertising strategies employed by firms. The research setting is the online retailing industry, which is characterized by extensive use of Web technologies and high competition for market share and profitability. For Internet retailers, search engines are increasingly serving as an information gateway for many decision-making tasks. In particular, Search engine advertising (SEA) has opened a new marketing channel for retailers to attract new customers and improve their performance. In addition to natural (organic) search marketing strategies, search engine advertisers compete for top advertisement slots provided by search brokers such as Google and Yahoo! through keyword auctions. The rationale being that greater visibility on a search engine during a keyword search will capture customers' interest in a business and its product or service offerings. Search engines account for most online activities today. Compared with the slow growth of traditional marketing channels, online search volumes continue to grow at a steady rate. According to the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, spending on search engine marketing by North American firms in 2008 was estimated at $13.5 billion. Despite the significant role SEA plays in Web retailing, scholarly research on the topic is limited. Prior studies in SEA have focused on search engine auction mechanism design. In contrast, research on the business value of SEA has been limited by the lack of empirical data on search advertising practices. Recent advances in search and retail technologies have created datarich environments that enable new research opportunities at the interface of marketing and information technology. This research uses extensive data from Web retailing and Google-based search advertising and evaluates Web retailers' use of resources, search advertising techniques, and other relevant factors that contribute to business performance across different metrics. The methods used include Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), data mining, and multivariate statistics. This research contributes to empirical research by analyzing several Web retail firms in different industry sectors and product categories. One of the key findings is that the dynamics of sponsored search advertising vary between multi-channel and Web-only retailers. While the key performance metrics for multi-channel retailers include measures such as online sales, conversion rate (CR), c1ick-through-rate (CTR), and impressions, the key performance metrics for Web-only retailers focus on organic and sponsored ad ranks. These results provide a useful contribution to our organizational level understanding of search engine advertising strategies, both for multi-channel and Web-only retailers. These results also contribute to current knowledge in technology-driven marketing strategies and provide managers with a better understanding of sponsored search advertising and its impact on various performance metrics in Web retailing