Dynamic Effects of Ad Content on Ad Liking: A Novel Method for Ad Pretesting

Abstract

Virtually all ad agencies test their created video ads before launching them. The main objective is to identify whether and how the ad content needs to be modified based on consumer reactions. However, while advertising managers are interested to link ad content to ad liking for single ads, managerial practice and existing research is often based on analysis of content effects across ads. The main reason for not analyzing the content effects on an ad specific level, is that content and liking often evolve at different frequencies: While content evolves scene-by-scene according to creative briefs, liking is often measured on a second-by-second level. We develop a method which accounts for the different frequency and provides diagnostic information to managers on which video scene(s) to edit and which ad content to modify. After demonstrating its adequacy in simulation studies, we apply this method to 100 ad creatives, and show that content effects vary largely across ads, underlining the need of ad specific estimation. We conduct a meta-analysis of 100 ad creatives, which is the largest study of its kind, to provide generalizable effects related to narrative elements, known as plot structures. The results show that the ad content effects generalize across industry sectors, while their heterogeneity relates to the narrative elements, known as the plot structures, which moderate the content effects.

Biography

Edlira Shehu is an Associate Professor at the Department of Marketing of Copenhagen Business School. Previously, she was Associate Professor at the University of Southern Denmark. She obtained her doctoral degree and her state doctorate (Habilitation) from the University of Hamburg in Germany. Edlira’s research focuses on topics of non-profit marketing, marketing analytics and innovation management. Her research has been published in leading journals, such as Research Policy or International Journal of Research in Marketing. Before joining the academia, she worked in different management positions in the field of marketing analytics.

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