Ads that Hurt
In some earlier posts I talked about the idea that advertisements can be privately profitable for firms but still be socially harmful due to uninternalized negative effects on their targets. In the...
View ArticleNo Death of a Buyerman
Do ads bias beliefs? Many think so, and want to regulate ads. And yes, many ads don’t seem to offer much useful info. Here are four ad theories: Exploiting bias – the small leaks of our ancestors’...
View ArticleCalibrate Your Ad Response
Imagine you are about to watch a car ad. You now have expectations about various aspects of the car, including its reliability, comfort, acceleration, cool factor, and so on. These all combine into...
View ArticleProfessors Progress Like Ads Advise
A system designed to advise a captive audience about the features and quality of available products would look a lot more like Consumer Reports than the world of advertising we see. But this situation...
View ArticleNo DVR Ad Effect
Digital video recorders don’t reduce the (possibly zero) effect of ads. For years, digital video recorders like TiVo, which give viewers the option to skip commercials, have had television advertisers...
View ArticleBrands Show Identity
Marketers have long noticed puzzlingly high levels of brand loyalty: Consumers appear to have high willingness to pay for particular brands, even when the alternatives are objectively similar. The...
View ArticleAdvertising Podcast
Katja Grace and I did another podcast, this time on advertising. Audio here.
View ArticleIn Praise Of Ads
As Katja and I discussed in our podcast on ads, most people we know talk as if they hate, revile, and despise ads. They say ads are an evil destructive manipulative force that exists only because big...
View ArticleWhy Do Firms Buy Ads?
Firms almost never have enough data to justify their belief that ads work: Classical theories assume the firm has access to reliable signals to measure the causal impact of choice variables on profit....
View ArticleMass Moralizing
When a McDonald’s ad shows a dad and a young daughter bonding in the drive through lane, all smiles and excitement, it is claiming that eating at McDonald’s with one’s child is a way of giving to the...
View Article
