Leveraging Data

• Research & Data Quality
• Article

Demystifying Data Cleanrooms: A Marketer’s Handbook

The ARF Cross-Platform Measurement Council has put out a practical handbook to help marketers and media operators gain a full understanding of data cleanrooms. It explains how cleanroom vendors provide clients and their partners with such a service, which links first-party data across two or more companies on a record level in a secure and privacy-compliant fashion. Interest in cleanrooms has been increasing because the disappearance of third-party cookies is on the horizon. The handbook not only demystifies cleanrooms, but it also includes use cases for insights, audience activation and measurement, and offers practical advice on questions to ask data cleanroom providers.

• Audience & Media Measurement
• Article

Spillover Benefits of Online Ads

• MSI

Email advertising can increase spending in actual, physical retail stores, new statistical tools show. If this is not uplifting enough for those who deal with such advertising, analysis published in an MSI working paper found something else surprising. The effects are highest among consumers with fewer recent interactions with that particular retailer.

• Research & Data Quality
• Article

Can Observational Methods Assess the Causal Effect of Ads?

• MSI

While Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) are ideal for advertising measurement, it is not always feasible to conduct one. Until advertising platforms are willing to provide more information about how they deliver targeted ads or implement auctions, alternative observational methods are unlikely to reliably estimate causal effects. That includes utilizing newer machine learning techniques.

• Analytics & Data Science
• Article

Optimizing Interventions Along the Customer Journey

• MSI

Random controlled experiments for A/B testing help improve things like a company's marketing or customer service. However, individually optimizing interventions may not always capture interactions across the entire purchase decision journey. To optimize interventions more holistically, use a Bayesian reinforcement learning model. It can integrate multiple historical experiments, which can improve both current impact as well as future learning.

• Targets & Segments
• Article

How Does a Sports Sponsorship Announcement Affect a Sponsor’s Market Value?

• JOURNAL OF ADVERTISING RESEARCH

Do sports sponsorship announcements help or hurt the stock-market returns of sponsor companies and their rivals? A study comparing these effects in the U.S. and Japan provides insight into competitive advantages (or lack thereof) between sponsors and their rivals, depending on market reactions in each country, whether the sporting event is held in a home country and the market impact between rival firms.

• Research & Data Quality
• Article

ARF Academic Journal Highlighted for Industry Authors, Expansive Themes

• JOURNAL OF ADVERTISING RESEARCH

In December 2020, the Journal of Advertising Research published an independent seminal bibliographic study that identified key publishing trends since the academic journal’s inception in 1960. Now, a more granular overview expands on those findings to reveal the prominence of practitioner authors amid a wide range of themes, while encouraging future submissions.

• Targets & Segments
• Article

Does Alexa Make Humans More Humane?

• MSI

Do digital voice assistants make website navigation easier? Not necessarily, according to this MSI working paper. Researchers found that a sense of “social presence” created by such assistants can evoke social norms. And so, these devices can in fact predispose consumers to more prosocial behavior, such as donating to important causes and tipping.

• Research & Data Quality
• Article

Are Marketers Using the Right Metrics?

• MSI

Which is more efficient when it comes to advantageous decision outcomes, marketing-mix metrics or financial metrics? Researchers in this award-winning MSI working paper investigated this question, basing their research on a behavioral framework and statistical model. On average, according to their sample, marketing-mix metrics are more effective than financial. Even so, managers seem more eager to use financial metrics, possibly, because they are easier to understand across the organization.

• Research & Data Quality
• Article

Aggregating Location Data for Privacy and Profit

• MSI

Using mobile location data to improve targeting marketing is a good strategy, but the downside is that it can increase consumer concern over privacy. What’s a better way to do it? Instead of aggregating data by home location, doing so by the centroid of brand sites visited can result in good predictions, while still maintaining individual anonymity.

• Analytics & Data Science
• Article

Improving Product Sales Predictions Is Brain Science

• MSI

It’s no surprise that new product launches often fail to meet their targets. The trick for managers is to improve their predictions for such products. They must balance the costs and benefits of many different data sources and analytic techniques in order to improve forecasting. To enhance the accuracy of predicting the market-level sales of new products, researchers Marton Varga, Anita Tusche, Paulo Albuquerque, Nadine Gier, Bernd Weber, and Hilke Plassmann, analyzed the added value of different data types. Their conclusions are illuminating.