Despite a 20-year trend toward integrated marketing communications, advertisers almost never coordinate television and search advertising campaigns. This paper investigates the simplest possible explanation for this phenomenon, the possibility that television advertising does not influence online search. It finds a statistically significant association between television advertising for financial services brands and consumers’ tendency to search branded keywords (e.g. “Fidelity”) rather than generic category-related keywords (e.g. “stocks”). The effect is largest for young brands during standard business hours with an elasticity, .07, comparable to extant measurements of advertising’s impact on sales. However, television advertising is not correlated with category search incidence. These findings confirm the external validity of previous experimental findings and suggest that practitioners should account for these effects when planning, executing, and evaluating both television and search advertising campaigns.


Keywords: Advertising, Information Search, Media, Search Engine Marketing, Television

Suggested CitationJoo, Mingyu, Wilbur, Kenneth C. and Zhu, Yi, Television Advertising and Online Search (December 4, 2011). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1720713