Tag Archives: advertising

From Spacing to Scheduling: The Effect of Seller Posting Time Strategies for Short Video Advertising

Yuan, Lin, Gene Moo Lee, Hao Xia, Qiang Ye. “From Spacing to Scheduling: The Effect of Seller Posting Time Strategies for Short Video Advertising”, Accepted at CIST 2023.

We examine how a seller’s posting time strategies of short video advertising affect consumer engagement and product sales. Drawing on the two-factory theory, we develop hypotheses on the effects of ad spacing and scheduling on ad effectiveness. The empirical results based on a unique short video ad dataset from Douyin, the Chinese counterpart of TikTok, indicate that there exists an inverted U-shape relationship between ad spacing and sales. Also, certain posting times significantly increase ad effectiveness. Interestingly, the effects of posting time strategies manifest under specific conditions: the effects of ad spacing on consumer purchase are strengthened for products with higher discounts, while this moderating effect is diverse for different posting times. These results provide nuanced insights to help ad managers make strategic decisions on ad posting times in the important context of social commerce.

When Does Congruence Matter for Pre-roll Video Ads? The Effect of Multimodal, Ad-Content Congruence on the Ad Completion

Park, Sungho, Gene Moo Lee, Donghyuk Shin, Sang-Pil Han. “When Does Congruence Matter for Pre-roll Video Ads? The Effect of Multimodal, Ad-Content Congruence on the Ad Completion“, Working Paper [Last update: Jan 29, 2023]

  • Previous title: Targeting Pre-Roll Ads using Video Analytics
  • Funded by Sauder Exploratory Research Grant 2020
  • Presented at Southern Methodist University (2020), University of Washington (2020), INFORMS (2020), AIMLBA (2020), WITS (2020), HKUST (2021), Maryland (2021), American University (2021), National University of Singapore (2021), Arizona (2022), George Mason (2022), KAIST (2022), Hanyang (2022), Kyung Hee (2022), McGill (2022)
  • Research assistants: Raymond Situ, Miguel Valarao

Pre-roll video ads are gaining industry traction because the audience may be willing to watch an ad for a few seconds, if not the entire ad, before the desired content video is shown. Conversely, a popular skippable type of pre-roll video ads, which enables viewers to skip an ad in a few seconds, creates opportunity costs for advertisers and online video platforms when the ad is skipped. Against this backdrop, we employ a video analytics framework to extract multimodal features from ad and content videos, including auditory signals and thematic visual information, and probe into the effect of ad-content congruence at each modality using a random matching experiment conducted by a major video advertising platform. The present study challenges the widely held view that ads that match content are more likely to be viewed than those that do not, and investigates the conditions under which congruence may or may not work. Our results indicate that non-thematic auditory signal congruence between the ad and content is essential in explaining viewers’ ad completion, while thematic visual congruence is only effective if the viewer has sufficient attentional and cognitive capacity to recognize such congruence. The findings suggest that thematic videos demand more cognitive processing power than auditory signals for viewers to perceive ad-content congruence, leading to decreased ad viewing. Overall, these findings have significant theoretical and practical implications for understanding whether and when viewers construct congruence in the context of pre-roll video ads and how advertisers might target their pre-roll video ads successfully.

Enhancing Social Media Analysis with Visual Data Analytics: A Deep Learning Approach (MISQ 2020)

Shin, Donghyuk, Shu He, Gene Moo Lee, Andrew B. Whinston, Suleyman Cetintas, Kuang-Chih Lee (2020) Enhancing Social Media Analysis with Visual Data Analytics: A Deep Learning Approach, MIS Quarterly, 44(4), pp. 1459-1492. [SSRN]

  • Based on an industry collaboration with Yahoo! Research
  • The first MISQ methods article based on machine learning
  • Presented in WeB (Fort Worth, TX 2015), WITS (Dallas, TX 2015), UT Arlington (2016), Texas FreshAIR (San Antonio, TX 2016), SKKU (2016), Korea Univ. (2016), Hanyang (2016), Kyung Hee (2016), Chung-Ang (2016), Yonsei (2016), Seoul National Univ. (2016), Kyungpook National Univ. (2016), UKC (Dallas, TX 2016), UBC (2016), INFORMS CIST (Nashville, TN 2016), DSI (Austin, TX 2016), Univ. of North Texas (2017), Arizona State (2018), Simon Fraser (2019), Saarland (2021), Kyung Hee (2021), Tennessee Chattanooga (2021), Rochester (2021), KAIST (2021), Yonsei (2021), UBC (2022), Temple (2023)

This research methods article proposes a visual data analytics framework to enhance social media research using deep learning models. Drawing on the literature of information systems and marketing, complemented with data-driven methods, we propose a number of visual and textual content features including complexity, similarity, and consistency measures that can play important roles in the persuasiveness of social media content. We then employ state-of-the-art machine learning approaches such as deep learning and text mining to operationalize these new content features in a scalable and systematic manner. For the newly developed features, we validate them against human coders on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Furthermore, we conduct two case studies with a large social media dataset from Tumblr to show the effectiveness of the proposed content features. The first case study demonstrates that both theoretically motivated and data-driven features significantly improve the model’s power to predict the popularity of a post, and the second one highlights the relationships between content features and consumer evaluations of the corresponding posts. The proposed research framework illustrates how deep learning methods can enhance the analysis of unstructured visual and textual data for social media research.

Matching Mobile Applications for Cross Promotion (ISR 2020)

Lee, Gene Moo, Shu He, Joowon Lee, Andrew B. Whinston (2020) Matching Mobile Applications for Cross-Promotion. Information Systems Research 31(3), pp. 865-891.

  • Based on an industry collaboration with IGAWorks
  • Presented in Chicago Marketing Analytics (Chicago, IL 2013), WeB (Auckland, New Zealand 2014), Notre Dame (2015), Temple (2015), UC Irvine (2015), Indiana (2015), UT Dallas (2015), Minnesota (2015), UT Arlington (2015), Michigan State (2016), Korea Univ (2021)
  • Dissertation Paper #3
  • Research assistant: Raymond Situ

The mobile applications (apps) market is one of the most successful software markets. As the platform grows rapidly, with millions of apps and billions of users, search costs are increasing tremendously. The challenge is how app developers can target the right users with their apps and how consumers can find the apps that fit their needs. Cross-promotion, advertising a mobile app (target app) in another app (source app), is introduced as a new app-promotion framework to alleviate the issue of search costs. In this paper, we model source app user behaviors (downloads and postdownload usages) with respect to different target apps in cross-promotion campaigns. We construct a novel app similarity measure using latent Dirichlet allocation topic modeling on apps’ production descriptions and then analyze how the similarity between the source and target apps influences users’ app download and usage decisions. To estimate the model, we use a unique data set from a large-scale random matching experiment conducted by a major mobile advertising company in Korea. The empirical results show that consumers prefer more diversified apps when they are making download decisions compared with their usage decisions, which is supported by the psychology literature on people’s variety-seeking behavior. Lastly, we propose an app-matching system based on machine-learning models (on app download and usage prediction) and generalized deferred acceptance algorithms. The simulation results show that app analytics capability is essential in building accurate prediction models and in increasing ad effectiveness of cross-promotion campaigns and that, at the expense of privacy, individual user data can further improve the matching performance. This paper has implications on the trade-off between utility and privacy in the growing mobile economy.