Unlike specialist magazines specialist TV channels rarely attract specialist audiences. Small specialist channels simply attract small audiences, who spent very little time watching the channel. Read More...

Targeted campaigns generate higher response rates, but that doesn’t mean they are more effective. Read More...

To win an advertising sales effectiveness awards you need to be able to see your sales effect. This is easier if it is truncated in time, not spread out as some much advertising effect is. There are some instances where you are more likely to be able to see a sales spike when you turn the advertising on and off. These circumstances have an advantage in winning awards. But just because an effect is easier to see in aggregate sales, doesn’t mean the sales effect is actually larger. Read More...

Quantifying the causal effects of the marketing mix is the marketing 'holy grail'. Marketing mix modellers amazingly claim to be able to do this with multivariate statistics, usually from a single set of data. This magic trick would be great if it worked, but there are fundamental reasons why the model will most probably be very wrong, and you can never tell how wrong it is - until you try to use it to predict the future impact of changes. Read More...

In order to understand the DVR effect we need a realistic picture of how much avoidance occurs already in a non-DVR environment. It could very well be that DVR facilitated ad skipping merely replaces other forms of passive and active ad avoidance - in which case DVR impact will be negligible. Read More...