THE 3RD AGE OF EFFECTIVENESS

Is today the worst era for advertising effectiveness, or the best? Grace Kite holds a PhD in economics, writes a column for Marketing Week and founded the consultancy Magic Numbers. Using a database of hundreds of econometric cases, she shows it is the best. As online advertising was added to the media mix, return on investment first fell. Since the mid-2010s it has been rising, and today it is higher than in 2005.

You'll learn why advertising on mobiles didn't seem to pay at first and what helped the estate agent Purplebricks, what Smart Shopping campaigns did for the Czech retailer Kytary, and why Performance Max and Advantage+ don't yet understand incrementality. Grace uses two businesses during COVID to show what it costs when an organisation doesn't get incrementality. In the Q&A she talks about the end of third-party cookies, automated ad buying and open-source MMM.