Immediate Responses of Online Brand Search and Price Search to TV Ads

This study aims to deepen the understanding of evaluating TV ad spots by their immediate effects on important online activities. The authors merged minute-by-minute brand search and price search data with spot-level TV advertisement data for the three leading pickup truck brands in the United States over an 11-month period. They presented a generalizable modeling framework and used it to estimate the size and variation of immediate online responses to TV ads. The average elasticity of brand search to a brand's own national ads is .09, and the average elasticity of price search to a brand's own national ads is .03. Given ad audience size, immediate search responses vary with ad creative characteristics, audience category interest, slot of the break, program genre, and time factors. Overall, the results show that ordinary TV ads lead to a variety of immediate online responses and that advertisers can use these signals to enrich their media planning and campaign evaluations.