MARKET METRICS

CLOSING THE MARKETING LOOP: Measuring Real World Clickthrough and Conversion for King Kong

Lynn Vavreck, Assistant Professor of Political Science
University of California at Los Angeles

Amanda Welsh, Senior Vice President of Research
Integrated Media Measurement Incorporated

Marshall Cohen, The Pilot Group

Al Alcorn, Chief Technology Officer
Integrated Media Measurement Incorporated

The Internet has changed the way we think about measuring advertising effectiveness. The ability to track clickthrough rates allows for precise calculations of ROI that were previously not possible using more traditional forms of advertising (television and radio). Using data from IMMI (Integrated Media Measurement Incorporated), we are able to calculate the effectiveness of movie ads and trailers on movie attendance and DVD viewing using unique data and methodology. The IMMI data is actual behavioral information, not respondents’ self-reports of their media habits or consumer choices; thus, an important element of error is removed from these analyses. The data, however, are observational in nature, even though they are not based on self-reports.

The observational nature of the data raises the possibility of non-random assignments to treatments (ads and trailers) that might be correlated with our behavior of interest (movie watching). Indeed, if marketing departments are doing their jobs, there will be characteristics of respondents that drive both their likelihood of seeing media promotions and their likelihood of seeing a movie. To understand the true effectiveness of an ad campaign, these intervening variables must be accounted for and allowed to have unique effects on the target behavior. IMMI’s vast data collection on media viewing provides exactly the data needed to control for the non-random assignment to treatments. We generate profiles of viewership and include these in the analyses of ad effectiveness as controls. We find that exposure to ads and trailers increasingly boost movie going and DVD viewing. More specifically, we find that each additional ad exposure raises the probability of an average person’s movie attendance by 1 percentage point, and each additional trailer exposure increases the average person’s chances of seeing the film by nearly 2 percentage points. At the average categories of exposure, ads can increase the average person’s chance of seeing a film by as much as 3 points, and trailers can increase those odds by about a half a point. View complete article (pdf)…