A Comprehensive Framework for Measuring the Immediate Impact of TV Advertisements: TV-Impact

Abstract

Measuring the immediate impact of television advertisements (TV ads) on online traffic poses significant challenges in many aspects. Nonetheless, a comprehensive consideration is essential to fully grasp consumer reactions to TV ads. So far, the measurement of this effect has not been studied to a large extent. Existing studies have either determined how a specific focus group, i.e., toddlers, people of a certain age group, etc., react to ads via simple statistical tests using a case study approach or have examined the effects of advertising with simple regression models. This study introduces a comprehensive framework called TV-Impact. The framework uses a Bayesian structural time-series model called CausalImpact. There are additional novel approaches developed within the framework. One of the novelties of TV-Impact lies in its dynamic algorithm for selecting control variables which are supporting data sources and presumed to be unaffected by TV ads. In addition, we proposed the concept of Group Ads to combine overlapping ads into a single ad structure. Then, Random Forest Regressor, which is a commonly preferred supervised learning method, is used to decompose the impact into single ads. The TV-Impact framework was applied to the data of iLab, a venture company in Turkey, and manages its companies’ advertising strategies. The findings reveal that the TV-Impact model positively influenced the companies’ strategies for allocating their TV advertisement budgets and increased the amount of traffic driven to company websites, serving as an effective decision support system.

Keywords

• television advertising
• causal inference
• counterfactual
• TV-ad impact measurement
• web session traffic
• supervised learning