UCL School of Management is delighted to welcome, Professor Ali Goli, Rochester University, to host a research seminar discussing; Long or Short? Personalizing Ad Length and Frequency.

Abstract:

We study the economics of advertising length using a large-scale randomized experiment on 18.3 million Pandora listeners. The experiment promoted a listening feature and randomly assigned users to advertising campaigns that varied in ad format (10 vs. 30 seconds) and frequency. For both users unfamiliar with the feature and those already familiar, we document meaningful incremental ad effects, with the relative advantage of long over short ads substantially larger among unfamiliar users.

We use machine learning to capture heterogeneity in both responsiveness to the campaign and realized exposure levels, and conduct off-policy evaluation of alternative campaign designs. A personalized policy that optimally allocates ad length and frequency across users increases incremental ad effects by about 30 percent. Two-thirds of this efficiency gain comes from leveraging heterogeneity in exposure rather than heterogeneity in responsiveness to the campaign.