Events

Professor Shunyuan Zhang
Assistant Professor of Business Administration
Marketing Unit
Harvard Business School
Harvard University

ABSTRACT

We explore the effect of digital ambiguous ads on consumers’ behavior throughout the purchase funnel, considering a multi-modal perspective of the display ad’s visual banner and its textual caption. Collaborating with a display ad platform, we first examine the consumers’ click-through rates (CTRs) for tens of thousands of cross-category digital ads. To operationalize ambiguity, we develop two custom deep learning-based ambiguity prediction models, each for one data modal. We find that beyond a rich set of ad characteristics (e.g., photographic attributes, language features, and image-text coherence), ambiguous ads receive higher click-through rates but lower conversion rates and efficiency. Next, to verify the causal links suggested in the field data, we conduct a pre-registered randomized field experiment, where we manipulate the amount of ambiguity of in a campaign. In particular, we create four versions of ads for a hearing-aid product with very similar images and texts, but different levels of ambiguity. Our analysis further reveals a negative impact of ad ambiguity on consumer conversion rate. Overall, our findings suggest that advertisers and scholars are well-advised to assess images and texts together rather than individually, and use ambiguity with care.