Moment Marketing: Measuring Dynamics in Cross-Channel Ad Effectiveness

Abstract

Moment marketing is a new strategy that entails the ability to synchronize online advertising (e.g., sponsored search) in real time with relevant offline events such as TV ads. More and more practitioners are employing this strategy, given the increasing availability of technologies that enable coordination across advertising channels in real time. However, very little is known about the instant impact of TV advertising on the effectiveness of search advertising. We take advantage of a unique opportunity for causal estimation in this research area by leveraging large exogenous variation in TV advertising expenditure over a long period, while at the same time having access to granular consumer search data under relatively stable sponsored search advertising strategies. Utilizing this novel setup, we provide the first empirical evidence that TV moment-based search advertising could be effective for optimizing sponsored search advertising for both TV-advertised brands and their competitors. We also document the mechanisms driving such cross-channel advertising effects. Specifically, TV advertising can change the quality of online search traffic (e.g., who searches, where they search, and how they search) in the moments following a TV ad, so that an average searcher responds differently to subsequent search results.