Advertising and promotion · Large-scale field experiment varying whether display ads matched website content (contextual targeting) and ad obtrusiveness; outcome was purchase intent, with heterogeneity by privacy-related measures/categories.
Online Display Advertising: Targeting and Obtrusiveness
Avi Goldfarb, Catherine Tucker (2011). Online Display Advertising: Targeting and Obtrusiveness. Marketing Science. https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.1100.0583
Plain-English take
Context matching and obtrusiveness each raised purchase intent separately, but their combination was ineffective and performed worse than using only one; the negative interaction was strongest among people refusing to report income and privacy-sensitive categories.
How much weight to give this
4/5 Field or experimental evidence with bounded scope
The 1–5 evidence-check score is a practical reading aid, not a formal peer review or a probability that a conclusion is true. It combines design strength (2 points), sample reporting (1), comparison/control clarity (1), and how much of the paper could be checked (1). Access affects how confidently this directory can assess a study, not the study's underlying quality. Blinding is reported separately because it is not relevant to every design.
Large-scale field experiment varying whether display ads matched website content (contextual targeting) and ad obtrusiveness; outcome was purchase intent, with heterogeneity by privacy-related measures/categories.
Visitors/users exposed to online display advertising in the field; the publisher abstract identifies a large-scale field experiment but does not give an N.
Review the paper for comparison conditions and analysis.
Publisher record checked; detailed methods were not verified.
Double-blind? Blinding was not established from the publisher page.
Research question
What the authors investigated
What does online display advertising: targeting and obtrusiveness show about customer behavior or marketing outcomes?
Design
Large-scale field experiment varying whether display ads matched website content (contextual targeting) and ad obtrusiveness; outcome was purchase intent, with heterogeneity by privacy-related measures/categories.
Sample and setting
Visitors/users exposed to online display advertising in the field; the publisher abstract identifies a large-scale field experiment but does not give an N.
Reported result
What the study found
Context matching and obtrusiveness each raised purchase intent separately, but their combination was ineffective and performed worse than using only one; the negative interaction was strongest among people refusing to report income and privacy-sensitive categories.
This is a paraphrase of the source. Check the original paper for definitions, estimates, statistical uncertainty and analysis details.
Scope and transfer
Limitations to keep in view
Conservative inference: purchase intent rather than realized purchase is the reported outcome in the abstract, and the field setting/creative are not specified there; generalization beyond those conditions is uncertain. Full-text methods and correction history were not independently checked.
Possible founder application
Use this study as a bounded example related to online display advertising: targeting and obtrusiveness; evaluate whether its customers, intervention and outcome match your own context.
Evidence access
Publisher page; full-text availability varies and was not established.
Study metadata and reported results were cross-checked against a direct publisher-page retrieval; detailed full-text methods were not reviewed.
If only an abstract or metadata was available, the profile is limited to claims supported there. A paper's paywall does not change its evidentiary status, but it limits what we can substantiate from accessible text.