Faculty & Research

HEC Paris Marketing Research Camp 2024

15 Nov

2024

9:30 am - 5:00 pm

Jouy-en-Josas

English

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Organizers: Klaus MILLER and Anastasia BUYALSKAYA (Marketing Department)

Building S, Room 227

As technology, consumer behavior, and social dynamics rapidly evolve, businesses, policymakers, and researchers are increasingly called to understand complex landscapes in advertising, AI, activism, and brand management. This series of talks brings together cutting-edge research that spans diverse but interconnected fields, exploring how AI can drive social good, how advertisers optimize their strategies in dynamic markets, the role of public perception in climate activism, and the importance of brand equity in the effectiveness of retail media. Each presentation offers unique insights and empirical findings that highlight both the opportunities and challenges in driving positive impact through informed, strategic, and ethical decision-making across sectors.

9:30 Welcome coffee

10:00 Talk 1: Chiara Longoni: Associate Professor of Marketing at Bocconi University

AI for social good: A behavioral science perspective on opportunities and challenges for ethical AI

AI has the potential to deliver socially beneficial outcomes to individuals, communities, and society at large. As a general purpose technology, AI can be used to understand problems, seek solutions, and make decisions to reach results potentially superior to those achieved by other means. Realizing this potential, however, hinges on understanding how AI is transforming our lives so that we can steer development and deployment of AI in a direction that is preferable for our society and sustainable for our future. In this talk, I will present a series of empirical findings that illustrate, across several domains, the opportunities and challenges that confront AI for social good. In particular, I will discuss: the psychological barriers to adopting AI in healthcare, the consequences of automating news reporting for perceptions of news accuracy, the potential risks associated with premature deployment of AI for trust in public institutions, and whether generative AI may moralize violations. I will conclude with a brief discussion of areas relating to AI for social good that would benefit from further research and action.

11:00 Coffee break

11:30 Talk 2: Carl Mela: Professor of Business Administration at Duke University

Advertiser Learning in Direct Advertising Markets

Carl F. Mela, Jason M.T. Roos, Tulio Sousa

Direct buy advertisers procure advertising inventory at fixed rates from publishers and ad networks. Such advertisers face the complex task of choosing ads amongst myriad new publisher sites. We offer evidence that advertisers do not excel at making these choices. Instead, they try many sites before settling on a favored set, consistent with advertiser learning. We subsequently model advertiser demand for publisher inventory wherein advertisers learn about advertising efficacy across publishers' sites. Results suggest that advertisers spend considerable resources advertising on sites they eventually abandon--in part because their prior beliefs about advertising efficacy on those sites are too optimistic. The median advertiser's expected CTR at a new site is 0.23%, five times higher than the true median CTR of 0.045%.

We consider how an ad network's pooling of advertiser information remediates this problem. As ads with similar visual elements garner similar CTRs, the network's pooling of information enables advertisers to better predict ad performance at new sites. Counterfactual analyses indicate that gains from pooling advertiser information are substantial: over six months, we estimate a median advertiser welfare gain of $2,756 (a 15.5% increase) and a median publisher revenue gain of $9,618 (a 63.9% increase).

12:30 End of morning sessions

12:45 Lunch at Petit Gustave

14:30 Talk 3: Eduardo Andrade: Professor of Marketing at Imperial College London

The Role of Action Logic and Disruption on Public Responses to Climate Activism

Amidst the climate urgency, protests have proliferated and diversified worldwide. While the effectiveness of disruptive tactics has been widely explored, little is known about the role of action logic—the perceived congruity between a protest’s actions and the advocated cause. We address this gap in six high-powered (N = 7,400) preregistered studies where the perceived disruption and action logic of a multitude of climate protests are either measured (studies 1 and 2) or manipulated (studies 3 to 6), and people’s support for the protests and the cause are assessed. Our findings reveal that (a) over and above levels of disruption, action logic uniquely influences public responses to climate activism, (b) lower action logic reduces protest support to the same extent as higher disruption, and (c) these effects extend to influence support for the climate cause, donations to climate funds, and even opinions about recent laws restricting climate protests.

15:30 Coffee break

16:00 Talk 4: Elea Feit: Assistant Professor of Marketing at The Wharton School

Brand Equity and Retail Media Effectiveness
with Morgan Bale and Eric Bradlow

Retail media, where retailers allow brands to promote their products to shoppers for a fee, is a rapidly growing segment of the advertising industry. As more retailers adopt this model, brands face the decision of whether to allocate their marketing budgets to these emerging channels. Our study demonstrates that brand equity plays a moderating role in the impact of retail media on product sales. We develop and estimate a dynamic linear model of brand equity that predicts weekly UPC-level sales, enabling us to examine how brand-level advertising strengthens brand equity and, in turn, enhances the effectiveness of retail media. Analyzing 11 years of grocery sales data from the Diet Soda category, we find that brands with higher equity benefit more from in-store display marketing and exhibit lower price sensitivity. Comparisons with benchmark models show that more aggregated approaches to retail media and sales overlook a key advantage of brand building: the shift in consumer response to marketing efforts (Keller 2003). Our counterfactual predictions reveal how brands can strategically invest in building brand equity to achieve greater returns from retail media.

17:00 End of afternoon sessions

17:30 Cocktail and dinner at Le Château HEC

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