Talk at the American Statistical Association Marketing Seminar Series

Yesterday I presented at the American Statistical Association Marketing Seminar Series. I spoke about the television advertising industry’s (e.g. Nielsen, VideoAmp, iSpot) move towards measure advertisements’ effectiveness based on outcomes (conversions) instead of reach and frequency, and the methodological and data challenges this shift presents. I shared my experience both in the industry and as an academic statistician researching causal inference and predicting conversions.

Here’s the abstract for the talk:

Television advertisers have traditionally cared about brand awareness—reaching the right audience at the right frequency and cost—but the industry is under growing pressure to demonstrate measurable treatment effects on conversion outcomes. This talk examines why that shift is so difficult to deliver on in practice. Unlike digital advertising, where randomized holdout experiments and persistent user identities enable credible causal inference, TV measurement involves a confluence of challenges: self-selected viewership with no auction mechanism to exploit, a patchwork of non-representative data sources, ecological inference challenges from household-level observation of individual behavior, and very small effect sizes. This talk traces the arc of academic progress in digital advertising measurement and explains the challenges of adapting them for TV. I will also discuss possible directions for future research at the intersection of statistics and causal inference where statisticians and causal inference researchers can make meaningful contributions.

You can see my slides here.