Does Television Advertising Influence Online Search?

Google Tech Talk February 3, 2011 Presented by Ken Wilbur, Assistant Professor of Marketing, Duke University, Fuqua School of Business ABSTRACT Traditional advertising influences consumer information search, and consumers increasingly use television and internet simultaneously. This paper finds a significant association between television advertising for financial services brands and consumers' tendency to choose branded keywords (e.g. "Fidelity") rather than generic category-related keywords (e.g. "stocks"). This 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 correlated with category search incidence. These findings show that practitioners should account for cross-media synergies when planning, executing, and evaluating both television and search advertising campaigns. The results also show why and how the search advertising literature should enrich its modeling of competition among advertisers. Google TechTalks are designed to disseminate a wide spectrum of views on topics including Current Affairs, Science, Medicine, Engineering, Business, Humanities, Law, Entertainment, and the Arts. DISCLAIMER The views or opinions expressed by the guest speakers are solely their own and do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of Google Inc.