The 2025 Guide on Using AI for Advertising Research

  • ARF ORIGINAL RESEARCH

This update to the ARF’s first comprehensive handbook, released last year, provides an exploration into the burgeoning technology’s transformative role in marketing and advertising research. It covers the integration of AI into marketing strategies, ethical considerations, future trends and practical case studies. This handbook is an essential guide for advertising research professionals looking to leverage any of the latest AI platforms while ensuring ethical and impactful outcomes.

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Binge-Watching and Advertising: When Streaming Habits Challenge Ad Effectiveness

  • JOURNAL OF ADVERTISING RESEARCH

Binge-watching dramatically reshapes how consumers respond to advertising on video-on-demand platforms. Drawing on psychological reactance theory, this study reveals that binge-watchers perceive ads as more intrusive and irritating, harming platform loyalty and boosting ad avoidance—unless the ad is highly likeable, which can soften negative reactions and protect platform engagement.

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How Ratio Framing Shapes Marketing Decisions

  • MSI

Marketers often use ratios like ROAS (Return on Advertising Spend) and ACOS (Advertising Cost of Sales) to communicate campaign efficiency. Researchers in this study find that the way in which these ratios are framed can dramatically influence stakeholder perceptions and decisions. Published in a working paper of the Marketing Science Institute (MSI), the study reveals that even mathematically equivalent ratios can shape contrasting judgments about marketing effectiveness, investment continuation and strategy preferences. This research underscores the psychological power of presentation and calls for smarter framing in marketing metrics.

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Learn About the Benefits, Limitations and Dangers of Using LLMs in Advertising Research

  • Knowledge at Hand

This report offers an abridged version of the cumulative 2025 AI handbook, exploring the benefits, limitations and dangers of generative AI models when employed in various tasks associated with marketing and advertising research. This report sums up the insights from several experiments where ARF researchers tested AI's capabilities in survey design, sentiment analysis, coding open-ended responses, language translation and addressing AI risks.

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Savoring Success: Creative Strategies That Make Food and Beverage Ads Work

  • JOURNAL OF ADVERTISING RESEARCH

Digital marketing’s fast pace allows for unprecedented testing of what drives ad success. This study combines human coding and machine learning across over 2,300 food, beverage and restaurant video ads, to reveal how sensory cues like “crunch sounds” and human interaction can significantly boost brand awareness, consideration and purchase intent—while some commonly used tactics, surprisingly, fall flat.

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