As part of Omnicom’s strategic partnership with the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Organic engaged with the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative to dive into the great online debate of how to properly attribute conversion credit to online media.

Over 18 months, Organic worked with the Wharton team along with researchers around the country to investigate this problem, culminating in a day long symposium where the research findings were presented and discussed with Organic’s Marketing Intelligence team along with other top analytics minds from Omnicom sister agencies.

Through this partnership five research teams from top universities were awarded access to a data set from Organic following a review of their proposals. Each team set out to create new analytical approaches that build on and augment Organic’s current models for measuring how individual online ad exposure patterns (featuring different creative executions and timing patterns) impact individual viewers, uniquely.

One of the research teams, Professors Michael Braun (MIT) and Wendy Moe (University of Maryland), developed a model that studied the interaction of three well-established advertising effects:

• Goodwill: Advertising affects a person’s long-term sentiment toward a company, and that effect is at its peak when the ad is shown but then fades with time.
• Wear-Out: Repetition of a single advertising creative concept makes it less effective. If you keep seeing the same ad, it becomes less effective each time you see it.
• Restoration: Taking a break from redundant ad exposure reverses wear-out. If you don’t see an ad for a long time, when you finally see it again, it is more effective.

They used their method to analyze an example data set provided by Organic that tracked the advertising exposures and subsequent conversions for individual Web browsers. This analysis uncovered the impact of the complex interrelation of these effects in a manner that had not been explored in previous research. The report’s complete findings will be unveiled in Q4 2011.

The findings also build upon the insights of Organic’s proprietary modeling efforts in the past and corroborate previous internal studies around creative impact and wear-out.

For more on the partnership and the full news release.

Image credit: Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative Picasa profile