Essays on Advertising

According to eMarketer, the total advertising spend in US alone was estimated to be over $238 billion. Firms invest large amounts of money in advertising to promote and inform consumers about their products and services, as well as to persuade them to purchase. The broad theme of advertising has been examined from many different angles in the marketing literature, ranging from empirically measuring effects of TV ads on sales to analytically characterizing the key economic forces stemming from enhanced targetability in online advertising. The purpose of my dissertation is to study some of the key questions which remain unaddressed in the advertising literature. In the first essay, I examine firms' choices of advertising content in a competitive setting. I demonstrate that competitive forces sometimes induces firms to choose advertising content that shifts consumers' perception of product quality. While this strategy hurts firms in a monopoly setting, it increases their profits under competition because it may increase the utility of their offering in comparison with the competing offering. In the second essay, I investigate the optimal mechanism for selling online ads in a learning environment. Specifically, I show that when ad sellers, such as Google, design their ad auctions, it is optimal for them to favor new advertisers in the auction in order to expedite learning their ad performance. In the third essay, I study the impact of tracking consumers' Internet activities on the online advertising ecosystem in the presence of regulations that, motivated by privacy concerns, endow consumers with the choice to have their online activity be tracked or not. I find that when ad effectiveness is intermediate, fewer ads are shown to opt-in consumers, who can be tracked and have their funnel stages inferred by advertisers, than to opt-out consumers, who cannot be tracked. In this case, consumers trade-off the benefit of seeing fewer ads by opting-in to tracking (positive instrumental value of privacy) with the disutility they feel from giving up their privacy (intrinsic cost of privacy). Overall, these findings shed light on novel strategic forces that provide guidance for marketers' advertising decisions in three distinct contexts

Measuring the effects of online advertising on human behavior using natural and field experiments

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2010.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references.This thesis investigates the effects of online advertising on human behavior: clicks, new-account sign-ups, and retail sales. Five chapters cover natural and field experiments used to measure these effects for both display and search advertising. The first chapter uses a natural experiment on the Yahoo! Front Page, aided by a flexible semiparametric model, to identify the causal effects of display ad frequency on internet users' responses as measured at the individual level by clicks and new-account sign-ups. Performance is heterogeneous regarding frequency and clickability; some campaigns exhibit significant decreasing returns to scale after one or two impressions while others show constant returns to scale even after fifty impressions. For some campaigns, a simple nonparametric regression which ignores selection bias finds increasing returns to scale, but none is found with the model that uses exogenous variation in views. Conversely, many campaigns that appear to exhibit diminishing returns when failing to account for selection, in fact, show little to no wear-out. The second chapter assesses the ability of online display advertising to attract new customers by analyzing a large-scale field experiment which exposed 3.7 million subjects to ads on Yahoo!. The number of new account sign-ups at an online business was tracked and shows a statistically significant impact of one of the two types of advertising campaigns. The ads served as Yahoo! run-of-network succeeded in generating a statistically significant increase in sign-ups of 8-14% relative to the control group. The ads shown on Yahoo! Mail did not produce a statistically significant increase in sign-ups. Despite being derived using millions of subjects, this estimate is quite noisy, with the upper bound of the 95% confidence interval estimate being a 15% increase in new customers. These estimates call into question click-only attribution models, as the number of users that clicked on an ad and converted is less than 30% of the estimated treatment effect. The third chapter asks, "Does advertising affect sales in a measurable way?" New technologies for tracking both sales and advertising at the individual level are used to investigate the effectiveness of brand advertising for a nationwide retailer. A controlled experiment on 1,577,256 existing customers measures the causal effect of advertising on actual purchases, overcoming the major hurdles regarding attribution typically encountered in advertising effectiveness research by exogenously varying exposure to the ads. Each customer was randomly assigned to treatment and control groups for an online advertising campaign for this retailer. Online brand advertising generated a statistically and economically significant effect on in-store sales for this retailer. The design of the experiment permits a demographic breakdown of the advertising's heterogeneous effects. Somewhat surprisingly, the effects are especially large for the elderly. Customers aged 65 and older, comprising only 5% of the experimental subjects, exhibited a 20% average increase in sales due to the advertising campaign, which represents 40% of the total effect among all age groups. The fourth chapter further investigates the effects of online advertising on sales. A quasi experimental approach is taken to analyze the randomized experiment in Chapter 3. Individual level data on ad exposure and weekly purchases at this retailer, both online and in stores, are combined and used to find statistically and economically significant impacts of the advertising on sales. The treatment effect persists for weeks after the end of an advertising campaign, and the total effect on revenues is estimated to be more than seven times the retailer's expenditure on advertising during the study. Additional results explore differences in the number of advertising impressions delivered to each individual, online and offline sales, and the effects of advertising on those who click the ads versus those who merely view them. The fifth chapter quantifies the externalities exerted among competing north ads in search advertising. "North" ads, or sponsored listings appearing just above the organic search results, generate the majority of clicks and revenues for search engines. The research question asks, "Does increasing the number of rival north ads decrease the number of clicks I receive on my own north ad?" A controlled experiment investigates this question and finds, surprisingly, that additional rival ads in the north tend to increase rather than decrease the click-through rate (CTR) of the top sponsored listing. Several possible explanations are proposed for this phenomenon, and directions for new theoretical models of sponsored search are suggested.by Randall A. Lewis.Ph.D

Take your marketing online!

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/aicpa_guides/2729/thumbnail.jp

Unmute This: Circulation, Sociality, and Sound in Viral Media

Cats at keyboards. Dancing hamsters. Giggling babies and dancing flashmobs. A bi-colored dress. Psy’s “Gangnam Style” music video. Over the final decade of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first, these and countless other examples of digital audiovisual phenomena have been collectively adjectivally described through a biological metaphor that suggests the speed and ubiquity of their circulation—“viral.” This circulation has been facilitated by the internet, and has often been understood as a product of the web’s celebrated capacities for democratic amateur creation, its facilitation of unmediated connection and sharing practices. In this dissertation, I suggest that participation in such phenomena—the production, watching, listening to, circulation, or “sharing” of such objects—has constituted a significant site of twenty-first-century musical practice. Borrowing and adapting Christopher Small’s influential 1998 coinage, I theorize these strands of practice as viral musicking. While scholarship on viral media has tended to center on visual parameters, rendering such phenomena silent, the term “viral musicking” seeks to draw media theory metaphors of voice and listening into dialogue with musicology, precisely at the intersection of audiovisual objects which are played, heard, listened to. The project’s methodology comprises a sonically attuned media archeology, grounded in close readings of internet artifacts and practices; this sonic attunement is afforded through musicological methods, including analyses of genre, aesthetics, and style, discourse analysis, and twenty-first-century reception (micro)histories across a dynamic media assemblage. By analyzing particular ecosystems of platforms, behavior, and devices across the first decades of the twenty-first century, I chart a trajectory in which unpredictable virtual landscapes were tamed into entrenched channels and pathways, enabling a capacious “virality” comprising disparate phenomena from simple looping animations to the surprise release of Beyoncé’s 2013 album. Alongside this narrative, I challenge utopian claims of Web 2.0’s digital democratization by explicating the iterative processes through which material, work, and labor were co-opted from amateur content creators and leveraged for the profit of established media and corporate entities. “Unmute This” articulates two main arguments. First, that virality reified as a concept and set of dynamic-but-predictable processes over the course of the first decades of the twenty-first century; this dissertation charts a cartography of chaos to control, a heterogeneous digital landscape funneled into predictable channels and pathways etched ever more firmly and deeply across the 2010s. Second, that analyzing the musicality of viral objects, attending to the musical and sonic parameters of virally-circulating phenomena, and thinking of viral participation as an extension of musical behavior provide a productive framework for understanding the affective, generic, and social aspects of twenty-first-century virality. The five chapters of the dissertation present analyses of a series of viral objects, arranged roughly chronologically from the turn of the twenty-first century to the middle of the 2010s. The first chapter examines the loops of animated phenomena from The Dancing Baby to Hampster Dance and the Badgers animation; the second moves from loops to musicalization, considering remixing approaches to the so-called “Bus Uncle” and “Bed Intruder” videos. The third chapter also deals with viral remixing, centering around Rebecca Black’s “Friday” video, while the fourth chapter analyzes “unmute this” video posts in the context of the mid-2010s social media platform assemblage. The final chapter presents the 2013 surprise release of Beyoncé’s self-titled visual album as an apotheosis to the viral narratives that precede it—a claim that is briefly interrogated in the dissertation’s epilogue

XVIII International Coal Preparation Congress

Changes in economic and market conditions of mineral raw materials in recent years have greatly increased demands on the ef fi ciency of mining production. This is certainly true of the coal industry. World coal consumption is growing faster than other types of fuel and in the past year it exceeded 7.6 billion tons. Coal extraction and processing technology are continuously evolving, becoming more economical and environmentally friendly. “ Clean coal ” technology is becoming increasingly popular. Coal chemistry, production of new materials and pharmacology are now added to the traditional use areas — power industry and metallurgy. The leading role in the development of new areas of coal use belongs to preparation technology and advanced coal processing. Hi-tech modern technology and the increasing interna- tional demand for its effectiveness and ef fi ciency put completely new goals for the University. Our main task is to develop a new generation of workforce capacity and research in line with global trends in the development of science and technology to address critical industry issues. Today Russia, like the rest of the world faces rapid and profound changes affecting all spheres of life. The de fi ning feature of modern era has been a rapid development of high technology, intellectual capital being its main asset and resource. The dynamics of scienti fi c and technological development requires acti- vation of University research activities. The University must be a generator of ideas to meet the needs of the economy and national development. Due to the high intellectual potential, University expert mission becomes more and more called for and is capable of providing professional assessment and building science-based predictions in various fi elds. Coal industry, as well as the whole fuel and energy sector of the global economy is growing fast. Global multinational energy companies are less likely to be under state in fl uence and will soon become the main mechanism for the rapid spread of technologies based on new knowledge. Mineral resources will have an even greater impact on the stability of the economies of many countries. Current progress in the technology of coal-based gas synthesis is not just a change in the traditional energy markets, but the emergence of new products of direct consumption, obtained from coal, such as synthetic fuels, chemicals and agrochemical products. All this requires a revision of the value of coal in the modern world economy

DRONE DELIVERY OF CBNRECy – DEW WEAPONS Emerging Threats of Mini-Weapons of Mass Destruction and Disruption (WMDD)

Drone Delivery of CBNRECy – DEW Weapons: Emerging Threats of Mini-Weapons of Mass Destruction and Disruption (WMDD) is our sixth textbook in a series covering the world of UASs and UUVs. Our textbook takes on a whole new purview for UAS / CUAS/ UUV (drones) – how they can be used to deploy Weapons of Mass Destruction and Deception against CBRNE and civilian targets of opportunity. We are concerned with the future use of these inexpensive devices and their availability to maleficent actors. Our work suggests that UASs in air and underwater UUVs will be the future of military and civilian terrorist operations. UAS / UUVs can deliver a huge punch for a low investment and minimize human casualties.https://newprairiepress.org/ebooks/1046/thumbnail.jp

Astronautics and aeronautics, 1963 chronology on science, technology, and policy

Chronological compilation of events relating to space exploration and exploitatio

Technology 2001: The Second National Technology Transfer Conference and Exposition, volume 2

Proceedings of the workshop are presented. The mission of the conference was to transfer advanced technologies developed by the Federal government, its contractors, and other high-tech organizations to U.S. industries for their use in developing new or improved products and processes. Volume two presents papers on the following topics: materials science, robotics, test and measurement, advanced manufacturing, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, electronics, and software engineering