Effects of Television Advertising on Internet Search

Abstract:     
Despite a 20-year trend toward integrated marketing communications, advertisers almost never coordinate television and search advertising campaigns. This paper investigates the simplest possible explanation for this phenomenon, the possibility that television advertising does not influence online search. It finds a statistically significant relationship between television advertising for financial services brands and consumers’ tendency to search branded keywords (e.g. “Fidelity”) rather than generic category-related keywords (e.g. “stocks”). The effect is largest for young brands during standard business hours with an elasticity, .07, comparable to extant measurements of advertising’s impact on sales. However, television advertising is not related to category search incidence. These findings confirm the external validity of previous experimental findings and suggest that practitioners should account for these effects when planning, executing, and evaluating both television and search advertising campaigns.

This paper was a precursor to Joo, Wilbur, Cowgill and Zhu (2013). The biggest distinctions are (1) the current paper uses 2006 search data from AOL whereas the later paper uses 2011 search data from Google and (2) the current paper finds no effect of TV advertising on the total number of category searches whereas the later paper finds a positive effect of TV advertising on category search incidence.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 52

Keywords: Advertising, Information Search, Media, Search Engine Marketing, Television

working papers series