A study that UCR assistant professor Mingyu “Max” Joo published back in 2014 continues to be highly influential.  

“Television Advertising and Online Search” has been cited in 214 other business research papers, including 36 papers published since the beginning of last year, according to Google Scholar. 

In recognition of such success, the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science recognized Joo with the Don Morrison Long Term Impact Award during a recent conference in Miami. The annual award goes to scholars who have made “a significant long-run impact on the field of marketing.”

“It is a great honor and we have never expected this paper to be recognized by the prestigious Long Term Impact award,” Joo said.

Joo, a marketing professor at UCR’s School of Business, examined how television advertising stimulates Google searches. Using internal Google data and collaborating with Google staff, Joo and his co-authors detailed how television ads for financial services increased both the number of related Google searches and searchers' tendency to use branded keywords in place of generic keywords. The study also identified how these cross-media effects are essential to the planning, executing, and evaluating of both television and online search advertising campaigns. 

Firms that ignored such cross-media effects likely spent too much on digital ads and too little on television, Joo said in a statement to INFORMS Society. But today, agencies measure how offline ads increase digital traffic to allow for more cost-effective advertising campaigns.

“At the time we wrote this article, we were hopeful to influence the shift,  and we are happy to observe practitioners’ higher attention to the cross-media spillovers,” Joo said.