A New Method of Measuring Online Media Advertising Effectiveness: Prospective Meta-Analysis in Marketing

The authors introduce a new method, prospective meta-analysis in marketing (PMM), to estimate consumer response to online advertising on a large and adaptive scale. They illustrate their approach in a field study in the U.S., China and the Netherlands, covering equivalent ad content on social media, online video, display banner, and search engines. The authors tested a conceptual framework based on attention and engagement using a technological solution that allow them to observe participants browsing and clicking activity in depth from their own residences, offices, or places of choice to use the tested media platforms, e.g., Facebook, Weibo, Google, Baidu and others. The authors show how consumers respond differently to the same ad depending on how distant they are from purchase, and uncover which channels are most appropriate to which user at different stages of the funnel. They also show how engagement and attention strengthen consumer response to advertising. The authors show how PMM produces exploratory findings, confirmatory findings, and replications by systematically organizing the incremental exploration of complex phenomena with cycles of discovery and validation

Consumer Response to Social Media and Online Video Advertising

This paper investigates the effectiveness of social media advertising and online video advertising using three large-scale controlled field experiments in the U.S., China and the Netherlands. The study was implemented using a technological approach that allows researchers to combine controls with real-world validity. The studies are based on an adaptive-experimentation method that allows across-sample and within-sample adaptation. This method facilitates incremental exploration of complex phenomena with cycles of discovery and validation across multiple studies. For the real-world stimuli in the automobile industry, the results show that advertising effectiveness of online videos is consistently stronger than social media and that the relative strength of social media increases the further temporally a consumer is from purchasing. We also find that attention strengthens consumer response to online video and social media advertising, but when both are viewed simultaneously at high levels of attention, they become substitutes

When in Doubt, Elaborate?

Online consumer-generated reviews contain two types of information: core (the review itself) and auxiliary (information accompanying reviews such as details about the reviewer and the review-generating process). Prior work has focused primarily on the former, despite the latter being commonplace. In this paper, we consider how a common type of auxiliary information — disclosure statements about incentives received by reviewers — affects review persuasiveness. Disclosure likely induces uncertainty about reviewer trustworthiness, leading consumers to discount reviewers’ opinions when forming expectations about product quality. However, we show this is not always the case. Instead, the extent to which disclosing incentives affects review persuasiveness depends on whether consumers deem their disclosure-induced uncertainty to be integral or incidental to judgment formation. This occurs through a metacognitive process in which consumers elaborate on the relevance of their uncertainty. Using a field study and three experiments, we show that when disclosure-induced uncertainty about reviewer trustworthiness is deemed to be integral, product evaluations are affected by this uncertainty. However, when uncertainty is incidental to judgment formation, product evaluations are unaffected