Television Advertising and Online Search

Despite a 20-year trend toward integrated marketing communications, advertisers seldom coordinate television and search advertising campaigns. We find that television advertising for financial services brands increases both the number of related Google searches and searchers' tendency to use branded keywords in place of generic keywords. The elasticity of a brand's total searches with respect to its TV advertising is 0.17, an effect that peaks in the morning. These results suggest that practitioners should account for cross-media effects when planning, executing, and evaluating both television and search advertising campaigns.