Moment marketing, a new sales strategy that leverages technology to synchronize online advertising with trending news and events in the real world, has taken the advertising world by storm. Facing ever fiercer competition for customers’ attention across channels, brands are increasingly turning to moment marketing to help them deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time.

But is this strategy as promising as it seems? The platforms involved are still so new that we know little about the effect of moment marketing on consumer engagement. HKUST’s Jia Liu and a co-researcher aimed to fill this gap, focusing on TV ads as trigger events. Moment marketing technologies can detect TV ads in real time and automatically coordinate bidding for targeted keywords and demographics. This allows advertisers to bid for the top spots in the results pages returned by search engines such as Google.

The researchers focused on the instant impact of TV ads on the effectiveness of search advertising. “Taking a large step beyond prior work,” say the authors, “we switch the focus to measuring the effectiveness of coordinated advertising through moment marketing for both TV-advertised brands and competitors.” They analyzed data from the U.S. pizza industry in 2017. This was the ideal setting, for several reasons. “First,” say the researchers, “advertisers spend a huge amount of money on both TV and search advertising channels.” In addition, pizza is a frequently searched-for product with high market saturation. “Bidding on the top brands’ keywords is an important and potentially effective strategy for a brand to either retain or acquire more consumer impressions, clicks, and, eventually, sales,” the researchers note.

Over a four-month period, one of the pizza brands sporadically turned its TV advertising spend on and off. Using detailed consumer search data from Microsoft’s Bing search engine, the authors were able to measure the immediate effect of the brand’s TV ads on consumer click-through rate (CTR), a measure of the performance of advertising.

They found that the focal brand’s TV advertising significantly enhanced online searches, ad views, and click-through counts. Local loyalty also played a part. In the brand’s home state, there were twice as many searches for the local brand as for its main competitor. These results were driven by a filtering mechanism. Briefly, viewers loyal to the focal pizza brand tended to search for it when they encountered a TV ad for that brand, while those loyal to the competing brand did not.

This study offers the first empirical evidence that TV-moment-based search advertising can optimize sponsored search advertising, “so that in the moments after a TV ad, the average searcher is more engaged.” This has important implications for designing effective search advertising strategies. “It is first important to understand the heterogeneity in consumers’ responsiveness to TV advertising across factors such as TV ad content, timing, keywords, demographics, location, and device,” say the researchers. These factors can be leveraged to better customize and target advertising in the search channel in real time. “To better attract consumers’ attention,” the authors write, “advertisers can synchronize search ads, using similar language and visuals across advertising channels targeted to different demographics.” This “could ultimately improve the return on investment for search advertising.”