Television Advertising and Online Shopping

Jura Liaukonyte (), Thales Teixeira () and Kenneth Wilbur ()
Additional contact information
Jura Liaukonyte: Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14850
Thales Teixeira: Harvard Business School, Boston, Massachusetts 02163

Marketing Science, 2015, vol. 34, issue 3, 311-330

Abstract: Media multitasking competes with television advertising for consumers’ attention, but may also facilitate immediate and measurable response to some advertisements. This paper explores whether and how television advertising influences online shopping. We construct a massive data set spanning $3.4 billion in spending by 20 brands, measures of brands’ website traffic and transactions, and ad content measures for 1,224 commercials. We use a quasi-experimental design to estimate whether and how TV advertising influences changes in online shopping within two-minute pre/post windows of time. We use nonadvertising competitors’ online shopping in a difference-in-differences approach to measure the same effects in two-hour windows around the time of the ad. The findings indicate that television advertising does influence online shopping and that advertising content plays a key role. Action-focus content increases direct website traffic and sales. Information-focus and emotion-focus ad content actually reduce website traffic while simultaneously increasing purchases, with a positive net effect on sales for most brands. These results imply that brands seeking to attract multitaskers’ attention and dollars must select their advertising copy carefully.Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2014.0899 .

Keywords: advertising; content analysis; difference-in-differences; Internet; media multitasking; online purchases; quasi-experimental design; television (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (53)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2014.0899 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ormksc:v:34:y:2015:i:3:p:311-330

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Marketing Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().