Advertising and Brand Attitudes: Evidence from 575 Brands over Five Years

TL;DR

This study analyzes how different advertising types influence brand attitudes across a large dataset, revealing that national traditional ads boost perceived quality and satisfaction, local ads enhance perceived quality and value, and digital ads mainly increase perceived value.

Contribution

It provides comprehensive empirical evidence on the differential impacts of national, local, and digital advertising on brand attitudes using extensive survey and ad spend data.

Findings

National traditional ads increase perceived quality, value, and satisfaction.

Local traditional ads boost perceived quality and value.

Digital ads primarily increase perceived value.

Abstract

Little is known about how different types of advertising affect brand attitudes. We investigate the relationships between three brand attitude variables (perceived quality, perceived value and recent satisfaction) and three types of advertising (national traditional, local traditional and digital). The data represent ten million brand attitude surveys and $264 billion spent on ads by 575 regular advertisers over a five-year period, approximately 37% of all ad spend measured between 2008 and 2012. Inclusion of brand/quarter fixed effects and industry/week fixed effects brings parameter estimates closer to expectations without major reductions in estimation precision. The findings indicate that (i) national traditional ads increase perceived quality, perceived value, and recent satisfaction; (ii) local traditional ads increase perceived quality and perceived value; (iii) digital ads increase perceived value; and (iv) competitor ad effects are generally negative.