MIT Sloan Professor finds online alcohol advertising significantly reduces the effectiveness of offline advertising bans
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--This holiday season when you’re buying a bottle of brandy to spike your eggnog or that case of champagne to ring in the New Year, stop and think for a moment about where you might have seen that alcohol advertised. Was it on a billboard on the side of the highway? Or, if you happen to live in a state that bans those sorts of advertisements, maybe it appeared on a banner ad on your favorite news website.
“Surprisingly, it almost doesn’t matter. According to a new paper* by Catherine Tucker, assistant professor of marketing at the MIT Sloan School of Management, people who are exposed to online ads for alcoholic beverages, but who live in states that restrict out-of-home alcoholic advertisements, are almost as likely to purchase alcoholic products as those who live in states without any restrictions. Many states, such as California, Texas, and Pennsylvania, have restrictions on out-of-home ads for items such as alcohol and tobacco on billboards, storefront signage, and transit ads.
The findings have important implications for the ability of governments to limit the effect that advertising has on the local population. “The Internet makes it extremely difficult for states and countries to restrict the kind of advertising their citizenry are exposed to,” she says. “Websites whose servers lie outside the ban’s jurisdictional boundary provide a persistent alternative advertising outlet - and make bans on off-line advertising less effective.”
Tucker, and her co-author Avi Goldfarb, a professor at University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, examined data from field tests that randomized exposure to online advertising for 275 different online advertising campaigns for alcohol to 61,580 people. Within that sample, they compared the purchasing intent of people who lived in states with bans on offline alcohol advertising to the purchasing intent of people who live in states without such bans.
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20101217005716/en/Bottoms-research-MIT-Sloan-Professor-finds-online
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