Garrett Johnson Profile picture
Oct 30, 2020 10 tweets 7 min read Read on X
👻👻👻 WHAT PROBLEM DOES GHOST ADS SOLVE? 👻👻👻
This is THREAD #1 about our 2017 JMR paper "Ghost Ads: Improving the Economics of Measuring Online Ad Effectiveness” with @EconInformatics & @enub
#MarketingAcad #DigitalMarketing #EconTwitter #AdFX 1/9 Image
Advertisers like Macy’s want to know the ROI of their #advertising campaigns. To understand the #incremental effect of ads, Macy’s need to know what consumers would do *had they not advertised*. Ad experiments deliver these answers. 2/ Image
#Experiments randomly assign users to Treatment or Control groups. Treatment users can see Macy’s ads and other ads too) but Control users can not. In “PSA” experiments, Control users see unrelated ads (e.g. Red Cross public service announcements) in place of the Macy’s ad. 3/ Image
But, PSAs are a real hassle😫. PSAs are also expensive💰: Macy's needs to spend the same per user on PSAs in Control as they do on Macy’s ads in Treatment. So, PSAs don’t scale: they are a barrier to always-on experimentation. 4/ ImageImage
So, what if we show the ’next best’ ad instead of the PSA? Well, now we see the work that PSAs were doing (in the ad logs). Without them, we don’t see🙈 how many Macy’s ads a control users *would have* seen or even if they would have been exposed at all! 5/ ImageImage
Stepping back, advertisers target different types of users. Only some portion of targeted users are actually exposed to Macy's campaign. Ideally, we want to compare exposed users in Treatment to would-be-exposed users in Control. 6/ ImageImageImage
Problem #2 with PSAs: Modern ad platforms match users to advertisers (e.g. based on click probability). This means the platform will show the Macy’s & Red Cross ads to *different types* of people: Macy’s-exposed & Red Cross-exposed are no longer apples🍎 to apples🍎! 7/ Image
What happens w/out PSAs? We can use the experiment to compare ALL Treatment to ALL Control group users (Intent-to-Treat). This delivers unbiased (🍎to🍎), but noisier🔊 lift estimates.
Why? Users who don’t see ads have 0 ad effect & their data only adds noise to estimates. 8/ ImageImage
In summary, the PSA & ITT approaches have offsetting advantages.
👻Ghost ads👻 (next thread) seek to deliver the best of both worlds🌎🌍: valid✅, precise✅ & scalable✅ experiments.
JMR paper: doi.org/10.1509/jmr.15…
Working paper: ssrn.com/abstract=26200…
9/9 Image

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More from @garjoh_canuck

Jun 4
🇮🇹Journeyed to Milan for a marketing conference hosted by @Unibocconi 🇮🇹
A 🧵… Image
First up, Sonja Gensler documents welfare harms of German regulations capping days for AirBnB hosts. This restricts supply, but the good news 😂 is that non-compliance blunts the welfare harm. Marginal effect on long-term rental prices: the intended benefit of the policy…
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@michielvancromb introduces a new research agenda on the “Spotify-ification” of the video game industry: consumers increasingly subscribe to a bundle of games, with profound consequences for the market. (And 3 papers!!!)
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Read 21 tweets
Dec 21, 2023
🚨Working paper update!🚨

What is the impact of strict #privacy regulation on content supply and demand?

In Sept 2019, YouTube paid a record $170M to settle charges it violated children’s privacy law (#COPPA). We use this to study the "privacy-for-content" tradeoff. 1/11 Image
Beginning Jan 2020, YouTube identified kids content and eliminated all related personalization including: personalized ads, search, content recommendations, & commenting.
This matches FTC's proposed rules to strengthen COPPA announced yesterday: 2/ bit.ly/3RMARdf
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YouTube creators worried these changes amounted to the "COPPAcalypse."
We study 5,066 top U.S. YouTube channels by comparing child-directed content creators to their non-child-directed counterparts using a difference-in-differences design. 3/ Image
Read 12 tweets
Apr 27, 2023
🚨New working paper!🚨

We study the "privacy-for-content" tradeoff using the 2019 YouTube COPPA settlement.

"COPPAcalypse? The YouTube settlement’s impact on kids content” w/ @TesaryLin, James Cooper, & Liang Zhong
➡️ ssrn.com/abstract=44303… 1/9 Image
Data sharing increases ad revenue, which pays for free content, & helps personalize websites to better find the content we want. On the other hand, people want more privacy online: especially for kids.
The YouTube settlement shows the consequences of strict privacy regulation. 2/ Image
In Sept. 2019, YouTube paid a record $170M to settle charges it violated children’s privacy law (COPPA). Beginning Jan. 2020, YouTube identified kids content and eliminated all related personalization including: personalized ads, search, content recommendations, & commenting. 3/ Image
Read 9 tweets
Feb 9, 2023
🧵What have economists learned from the #GDPR?
I review the literature for a future NBER book on the "Economics of #Privacy" edited by @ce_tucker & @avicgoldfarb. 1/7
nber.org/books-and-chap…
Regulators & researchers seek to balance privacy & the data economy. The EU’s #GDPR is a landmark & influential regulation that defines personal data expansively. GDPR establishes:
-rules for data processing,
-rights for EU residents,
-responsibilities for firms, &
-BIG fines. 2/
#GDPR is hard to study:
A) Finding a suitable control group is hard because the GDPR had global spillovers. E.g., it affects EU firms & non-EU firms serving EU residents.
B) GDPR can screw with personal data: e.g., you may only see data from consenting users. 3/
Read 9 tweets
Jan 26, 2022
🧵Explainer for the Topics API 🧵
Google announced the Topics API for Privacy Sandbox🏖️. Topics is basically FLoC v2.0. Google is deftly replacing FLoC v1 with a more anodyne technology and name...
Details: developer.chrome.com/docs/privacy-s…
1/8
Topics allows for interest-based ads without 3rd party cookies. Most research, including our own, shows ad prices are 2-3X higher with cookies.
Put concretely: Interest-based ads help fund content that is socially valuable, but uninteresting to advertisers. 2/ Image
In Topics, the browser classifies begins by classifying the sites that users visit into topics from a list of ~350 readable & benign topics like cats🐈 or hockey🏒.
To do so, sites must opt in and users can opt out. 3/ Image
Read 9 tweets
Jul 13, 2021
Thread explaining FLEDGE (formerly TURTLEDOVE).
Online advertising generates value for publishers, advertisers, & users. Now, Google & others are proposing alternatives that preserve this value while better protecting user privacy under the "Privacy Sandbox" proposals. 1/12
The public discussion of #PrivacySandbox is dominated by #FLoC, but many tech solutions are required to satisfy advertising use cases while protecting privacy. In particular, #FLEDGE propose more fundamental & interesting changes to the status quo. 2/
The key to FLEDGE is to move user targeting information onto the *browser*, rather than broadcasting a cookie ID to the adtech ecosystem so advertisers can bid on ad opportunities based on what they know about that cookie ID. The prototypical FLEDGE use-case is retargeting. 3/
Read 12 tweets

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