Background Noise? TV Advertising Affects Real Time Investor Behavior by Jūratė Liaukonytė, Cornell University.
Please register by sending an email to [email protected] with your full name, surname and university/work-place until 4 April, 13:00.
Seminar language: English.
Using minute-by-minute TV advertising data covering around 326,000 ads, 301 firms, and $20 billion in ad spending, we study the real time effects of TV advertising on investor search for online financial information. Our identification strategy exploits the fact that viewers in different U.S. time zones get exposed to the same programming and national advertising at different times, allowing us to control for contemporaneous confounding effects. We find that a TV commercial leads to a 3% increase in SECEDGAR queries within 15 minutes of the airing of that commercial. In a smaller sample, we find similar increases in Google searches for financial information. These ad-induced search lifts are associated with higher stock trading volume in the following trading day after the ad airing.