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With the pace of change moving at lightning speed, it’s hard to remember what life was like only five years ago–before a global pandemic upended our economy and way of life, before the age of AI and autonomous vehicles. The way we consume media and interact with brands has dramatically changed as well, with the rise of platforms such as TikTok and the recent surge of advertising across streaming channels.

In our rapidly evolving society, it's not often that something from 2019 remains accurate or even relevant in 2024. Kirthi Kalyanam, Distinguished Professor and Executive Director of the Retail Management Institute, has found an exception in his research An Experimental Investigation of the Effects of Retargeted Advertising: The Role of Frequency and Timing, which tackles foundational issues in marketing–specifically in the area of advertising retargeting. 

Kalyanam and his co-authors conducted a year-long field experiment with an online seller of home-improvement products to study the effects of retargeted advertising, a form of internet advertising in which banner ads are displayed to users after they visit the advertiser’s website. It found that the more frequently users saw ads the better and the sooner they saw subsequent ads after the first one the better, making it the first piece of research to answer and provide evidence for these long-standing questions. 

While many marketing professionals once thought that serving too many ads to the same individuals may minimize returns, the findings of the experiment demonstrated the opposite. What the researchers found is that while repetition of these ads may reduce their value in terms of initial impact, the brands still benefited from running them because they were playing the role of blocking competitors.

“In the digital age, there is even more competition for people’s attention, and brands need to be investing in both offensive and defensive strategies; it’s not enough to just play offense,” explains Kalyanam. “Marketers should be more open to the idea that some of what advertising is doing is blocking competition and blocking people’s attention from competition, which is a defensive strategy that is much easier to do online.” 

While some consumers might find it annoying to get the same ads on every web page, every social media app, filling every empty screen space, Kalyanam actually sees this as a benefit to consumers. “The blocking of competitors creates a firewall around a consumer and reduces the amount of distractions. Instead of seeing ads for an airline, a restaurant, a clothing brand, and a homegoods store, all while you’re just trying to order more paper towels, a brand can effectively block off competition and protect the attention of consumers. Not to mention, when a brand’s marketing is more effective, the cost of marketing goes down and so does the price of goods – it’s a win-win situation!

Kalyanam’s research was a finalist for the Best Paper Award in the Journal of Marketing Research when it was published in 2019 and was recently named as a finalist for the 2024 Weitz-Winer-O’Dell Award, which honors JMR articles published five years earlier that have made the most significant, long-term contribution to marketing theory, methodology, and/or practice.

“It was an honor for this paper to be named as a finalist in 2019 and it is an even bigger honor for it to be recognized for its relevance and application to marketing practice and research to this day,” says Kalyanam. “No matter how the world changes, what new technologies are introduced, or how consumers evolve, there are age-old, foundational issues in marketing that will never change, and that’s exactly what this paper addresses.” 

Five years from now, Kalyanam believes the impact of this research will be even more profound. Frequency, timing, and blocking issues will become more nuanced, and marketers must adapt and learn to be more tactful about how it is done. Kalyanam continues to explore and teach the foundational questions of marketing in the undergraduate, graduate and executive programs and Leavey and is excited to see what the future holds.