Webinars
Part 3 – Analytics Rebroadcast: Close Enough? A Large-Scale Exploration of Non-Experimental Approaches to Advertising Measurement
Data Challenges from Business Disruption – Solutions and Opportunities
Beginning in August 2022, MSI will broadcast each session from our 2022 Analytics Conference weekly on Tuesdays from 12:30-1:00pm ET. Attendees will be able to pose questions to be answered live or within a week of the broadcast. This event is open to corporate members. Please make sure to login to your account in order to register.
Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have become increasingly popular for measuring advertising effects. However, when RCTs are infeasible, advertisers—or their measurement partners—may rely on observational methods to estimate ad effects. We present the first large-scale exploration of two popular observational methods by comparing their accuracy with 1,673 large-scale RCTs on Facebook. Despite having a wealth of user-level data, neither method performs well, with median relative error rates between 5X and 11X. We conclude that observational methods for estimating ad effectiveness may not work until advertising platforms log highly granular features (e.g., at the auction-bid level) for modeling purposes.
speaker
Brett R. Gordon is the Charles H. Kellstadt Professor of Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. His research interests include pricing, advertising, promotions, new products, and competitive strategy, often with applications in retail or digital markets. Professor Gordon studies these topics by drawing on methods from empirical industrial organization, econometrics, and machine learning. He often collaborates with firms to study these problems. His research has appeared in scholarly journals such as American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing Research (JMR), Management Science, Quantitative Marketing and Economics, and Journal of Marketing. He is a three-time winner of the ISMS John D. C. Little Award at Marketing Science for best paper and he won the Robert D. Buzzell Best Paper Award from the Marketing Science Institute (MSI) for contributions to marketing practice. He currently serves as a Co-Editor at JMR. Prior to this, he was an Associate Editor at JMR, Management Science, Quantitative Marketing and Economics, and was on the Editorial Review Board at Marketing Science. He is a co-founder of the Quantitative Marketing and Structural Econometrics Workshop, which helps educate graduate students on state-of-the-art empirical techniques. He previously held a faculty position at Columbia Business School and has held visiting positions at University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and Stanford GSB. He earned his Ph.D. in Economics from Carnegie Mellon.