New Grace Kite research finds 40-50% of ad budget online brings highest returns

Sam Peña-Taylor

Advertising doesn’t share its lessons when it’s not trying to win awards.

Online ads, long blamed for the reported crisis of effectiveness in advertising, are not the enemy, says the economist Dr Grace Kite, founder of Magic Numbers, in a new piece of research based on a database of non-awarded campaigns. 

Speaking at EffWorks (October 2021), Dr. Kite’s research is based on the new Advertising Research Community (ARC) project, which attempts to move past advertising’s vanity problem: namely, that the industry is very shy about the lessons it has learned unless it is entering an award scheme. 

It’s a “serious problem” said Kite, who compares the situation of the advertising profession to...

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