Abstract:

Over 40 years ago Bass and Parsons declared that measuring the impact of advertising on sales is the most difficult and controversial problem in marketing. While still a challenge today, measurement of the effect of advertising has progressed. Marketers now have options including examining salience, aggregate sales uplifts or using gold standard single-source data to measure advertising effects. It may seem that engagement metrics are a natural progression in measuring the effect of advertising, but this paper asks if the debate about engagement is where attention should be directed.