Short-Term Effects of Advertising: Some Well-Established Empirical Law-Like Patterns

Extensive work with single-source data since the 1960s has consistently shown that advertising has a pronounced short-term effect on sales, that this effect decays over time, and that creative copy is the largest contributor toward effectiveness.

Short-Term Effects of Advertising: Some Well-Established Empirical Law-Like Patterns

Leslie WoodMedia Trust LLC

GENERALIZED LEARNINGS

Analysis of single-source data (combined data on media consumption with information on consumer product purchasing across time, matched at a household level) revealed four patterns of television advertising effectiveness. These four empirical patterns have been proven to hold for different types of advertised products and were tested on multiple single-source data sets.

EG1: Advertising can have a pronounced short-term effect on sales.

EG2: Advertising's effect on sales decays across time.

EG3: The most dramatic influence on advertising's effect on sales is creative copy.

EG4:...

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