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The impact of advertising content on movie revenues

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Abstract

We analyze the contents of print ads in the motion picture industry (e.g., number of reviews quoted in the ad, the presence of a top reviewer, size of the ad, star, director, etc.). We find that external validation (a recommendation by a top reviewer) is more important to revenues than the informative content of the ad.

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Notes

  1. For discussions along similar lines in the economics literature, see for example, Abernethy and Franke (1996) and Anderson and Renault (2006).

  2. The size of our data set is comparable to those used in earlier work (e.g., Elberse and Eliashberg 2003, Ravid 1999).

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Acknowledgements

We thank participants in the UCLA Annual Business and Economics Scholars Workshop in Motion Picture Industry Studies, and participants in SERG (Screen Economics Research Group) conference in Sydney, Australia, for their comments. We thank Jura Liaukonyte for her careful reading of this manuscript and valuable suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Cornell-SC Johnson College of Business, Johnson School, Cornell University, Ithaca, USA

    Vithala R. Rao

  2. Sy Syms School of Business, Yeshiva University, New York, USA

    S. Abraham (Avri) Ravid

  3. Research Fellow, Knut Wicksell Center, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

    S. Abraham (Avri) Ravid & Jialie Chen

  4. College of Business, University of Texas, San Antonio, USA

    Richard T. Gretz & Suman Basuroy

Authors
  1. Vithala R. Rao
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  2. S. Abraham (Avri) Ravid
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  3. Richard T. Gretz
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  4. Jialie Chen
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  5. Suman Basuroy
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Vithala R. Rao.

Appendix: How we code the ads.

Appendix: How we code the ads.

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Rao, V.R., Abraham (Avri) Ravid, S., Gretz, R.T. et al. The impact of advertising content on movie revenues. Mark Lett 28, 341–355 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11002-017-9418-5

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