Evaluating multimedia advertising campaign effectiveness

Abstract

Companies increasingly combine multiple media outlets when launching advertising campaigns. This study employs causal forest to examine the effects of complex multimedia campaigns. The model effectively corrects for selection bias, automatically identifies informative consumer features, and performs automated data-driven consumer segmentation based on the consumer features identified. We analyze a large dataset involving around seven million consumers and four thousand covariates, and provide empirical evidence on the nonlinear effect of repeated ad exposures in the multimedia context, how such effect varies across consumer groups, and the contingent existence of multimedia synergy. We demonstrate that negligence of the selection bias and heterogeneity across segments results in suboptimal conversions and a waste of advertising resources. The analysis procedure that we propose can facilitate decision making for complex advertising campaigns to improve their effectiveness.