Does Television Advertising Influence Online Search ?

This paper finds a significant association between television advertising for financial services brands and consumers’ tendency to search branded keywords (e.g. ―Fidelity‖) rather than generic category-related keywords (e.g. ―stocks‖). The effect is largest for young brands during standard business hours with an elasticity, .07, comparable to extant measurements of advertising’s impact on sales. However, television advertising is not correlated with category search incidence. These findings confirm the external validity of previous experimental findings and suggest that practitioners should account for these effects when planning, executing, and evaluating both television and search advertising campaigns.