Garrett Johnson
@garjoh_canuck
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Marketing professor @BUQuestrom researching digital marketing: privacy ( #GDPR & value+death of 🍪) & effectiveness (👻 ads). Could run Oilers better. 🇨🇦,🇺🇸.
Boston, MA
Joined January 2011
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I've created a succinct list of my advice regarding research aimed at PhD students. The advice many of us get is simply "do research" 😉
#MarketingAcad
#econtwitter
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Proud to become an American citizen today. I’m grateful for all this country has given me: an amazing wife, a world-class education, & a fulfilling career. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
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🔥👿🔥 New working paper alert! 🔥👿🔥
"Inferno: A guide to field experiments in online display advertising"
THREAD: This guide reviews challenges & solutions from a decade of research.
#marketingacad
#econtwitter
#fieldexperiments
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Does behavioral targeting create value? Now, we have 5 academic & industry (grey) studies that quantify how much value is lost without cookies. The loss estimates are: 65%, >66%, 52%, 4%, & 52%. I summarize the studies below.
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🤔DO ADS ACTUALLY WORK?🤔
🧵We tackle this question using a large collection of display ad field experiments in a working paper with
@EconInformatics
&
@enub
"The Online Display Ad Effectiveness Funnel & Carryover: Lessons from 432 Field Experiments”
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Thrilled to learn today that our “Ghost Ads” paper with
@EconInformatics
&
@enub
won JMR’s long-term impact award!! 🍾
Congratulations to
@garjoh_canuck
, Randall Lewis and
@enub
, winners of the 2022 Weitz-Winer-O’Dell Award for their article, “Ghost Ads: Improving the Economics of Measuring Online Ad Effectiveness." Learn more:
Read the full study:
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The whole thread is excellent, but this piece of media hypocrisy is worth dwelling on together with the rest…
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Google just released results from a study showing that ads fetch 52% less revenue without cookies—the EXACT SAME ESTIMATE as our recently accepted paper in Marketing Science. 1/
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Cambridge Analytica: we can hack the electorate’s brain and decide elections with targeted ads.
Reality: Ads have near 0 effects on average and by targeted subgroups.
I can not get enough of charts of advertising treatment effects. These come from randomized exposures in surveys with attitude scales as the response, yet still effects are near zero.
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Honored to be named a
@MktgScience
2021 Young Scholar alongside a great cohort of global scholars!
#MarketingAcad
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Our
#GDPR
research is now published in Management Science. It was selected as the lead article out of 35 (!) in the issue!
🚨Working paper update!🚨
🧵Post-
#GDPR
, website use of tech vendors fell 15% but relative concentration increased 17%.
"Privacy & market concentration: Intended & unintended consequences of the GDPR” w/ Scott Shriver &
@samgarvingold
(Image: Digiday) 1/14
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Over the next 3 days, I want to tell you about some of the very best young marketing scholars and their exciting research from the
#MSIYoungScholars
conference in sunny Boulder, CO🌄
@MktgScience
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So proud of my amazing colleague
@TesaryLin
🤩 on winning the 2022 Little Award for best paper in an ISMS journal 🍾🎉🎊
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Excited to announce that our
#GDPR
paper on concentration in the adtech/webtech space was accepted at Management Science! 🥳
🚨Working paper update!🚨
🧵Post-
#GDPR
, website use of tech vendors fell 15% but relative concentration increased 17%.
"Privacy & market concentration: Intended & unintended consequences of the GDPR” w/ Scott Shriver &
@samgarvingold
(Image: Digiday) 1/14
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🥳🥳Excited to announce that our second
#GDPR
paper is now forthcoming at American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 🥳🥳
Happy 3rd birthday🎂 of the
#GDPR
🇪🇺!
🧵We recently released a big update to our working paper examining how the
#GDPR
affected the site traffic💻 & ecommerce revenue💶 of EU users. (w/
@samgarvingold
& Scott Shriver) 1/11 (image: Digiday)
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🎉We are thrilled to learn that our paper on cookies in digital ads won the John D. C. Little Award for the best marketing paper published in Marketing Science & Management Science in 2020!🍾
This is especially great news for
@sherrydsy
who is on the job market this year. 1/4
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Thread explaining FLEDGE (formerly TURTLEDOVE).
Online advertising generates value for publishers, advertisers, & users. Now, Google & others are proposing alternatives that preserve this value while better protecting user privacy under the "Privacy Sandbox" proposals. 1/12
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Nice to see some better reporting on ads & privacy by the NYTimes.
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Google has released a public beta of Conversion Lift
#incrementality
testing for Google Ads powered by our ghost ads👻 methodology (a full five years after we first implemented ghost ads at Google)!
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I'm proud to have achieved the milestones of 1,000 citations and also 25,000 SSRN downloads. I love my job and its gratifying to have others engage with my work.
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Really excited to join this prestigious group at BU. Increasingly, my work intersects with law, CS, and econ. Looking forward to good research discussions!
🎉 We are so excited to announce our new Junior Faculty Fellows:
@anafiszbein
,
@garjoh_canuck
,
@eshedob
,
@lauradata
,
@scotthirst
, Prasad Patil, & Jihye Jeon! Congratulations to you all!
@BostonUResearch
#HICYeah
Learn more about our fellows here:
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🚨New working paper!🚨
We study the "privacy-for-content" tradeoff using the 2019 YouTube COPPA settlement.
"COPPAcalypse? The YouTube settlement’s impact on kids content” w/
@TesaryLin
, James Cooper, & Liang Zhong
➡️ 1/9
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Submitted two papers today. Was a very off-brand day! 😂
Seriously though, it's been a long journey through COVID times and more and I'm glad to have this to show for our big push.
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@JoiaMukherjee
@adapperprof
The turn off self-view option avoids this. We were never meant to watch ourselves talk to others and it is psychologically taxing.
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🚨New working paper alert!🚨
THREAD: Post-
#GDPR
, website use of web tech vendors falls 15% but relative concentration increases 17%.
"Privacy & market concentration: Intended & unintended consequences of the GDPR” w/ Scott Shriver
(Image: Digiday) 1/
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🚨Working paper update!🚨
🧵Post-
#GDPR
, website use of tech vendors fell 15% but relative concentration increased 17%.
"Privacy & market concentration: Intended & unintended consequences of the GDPR” w/ Scott Shriver &
@samgarvingold
(Image: Digiday) 1/14
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A good reporter wrote a weak
@nytopinion
piece pining for a return to contextual advertising (i.e., finance ads next to finance-related content). This misapprehends how & how much digital advertising works. 1/5
We’ve all been told that the creepy ads that follow us around the Internet are the price we have to pay for all the free services we enjoy.
But what if the price is too high and there was another way?
Thread on my latest
@NYTOpinion
piece:
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Run experiments, people!
For those worried about the impacts of ads, even the most advanced methods at capturing their impact don't do a very good job of it.
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Excited to have my first NBER working paper. Hope to have more to share about this paper next week!
A review of economic research on the EU's General Data Protection Regulation: its impact on firms, consumers, privacy, competition, and innovation, from
@garjoh_canuck
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Today, I spoke at the W3C improving web advertising business group about the economics of digital ad identity. Thread🧵 on some takeaways on the future of digital ads. 1/
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Excited to announce that 🔥Inferno🔥 has been accepted at Journal of Economics & Management Strategy.
I'm particularly proud of this thread👇
🔥👿🔥 New working paper alert! 🔥👿🔥
"Inferno: A guide to field experiments in online display advertising"
THREAD: This guide reviews challenges & solutions from a decade of research.
#marketingacad
#econtwitter
#fieldexperiments
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We just released a major update of our paper on the
#GDPR
& market concentration.
We study an industry that is again in the news for the hard tradeoffs it poses between privacy protection and value creation.
1/8
🚨Working paper update!🚨
🧵Post-
#GDPR
, website use of tech vendors fell 15% but relative concentration increased 17%.
"Privacy & market concentration: Intended & unintended consequences of the GDPR” w/ Scott Shriver &
@samgarvingold
(Image: Digiday) 1/14
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So proud of my wife
@magreenfield
for being selected as a member of the World Economic Forum council on post-
#COVID19
economic recovery: the Global Future Council on the New Agenda for Economic Growth and Recovery
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So pleased to see this milestone paper on the (modest) effects of TV advertising get published in Econometrica. Well done Brad, Gunter & Anna!! 🥰🥰🥰
New estimates of TV advertising effectiveness across 288 CPG brands show that advertising generally has little effect on sales and most brands earn a negative ROI. The results cast doubt on the sustainability of financing TV content markets with ad revenue
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Check out
@julian_runge
& his
@Meta
co-authors' thoughts on marketing mix modelling using experimental calibration to build marketing models as marketers lose user-level measurement.
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🧵What have economists learned from the
#GDPR
?
I review the literature for a future NBER book on the "Economics of
#Privacy
" edited by
@ce_tucker
&
@avicgoldfarb
. 1/7
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Check out this really nice profile of my research by the fine folks at Hariri !!
FACULTY SPOTLIGHT: Junior Faculty Fellow
@garjoh_canuck
works at the intersection of
#economics
&
#DigitalMarketing
to inform online
#privacy
& help build a better, safer internet for all. Learn more about his research here:
#HICYeah
@BUexperts
@BUQuestrom
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One of things I’m most looking forward to in 2020 is
@TesaryLin
joining our group
@BUQuestrom
. We are incredibly fortunate to land one of the best researchers on the market in the past 5 years IMHO.
Give her a follow!
PhD student Tesary Lin combines economics and behavioral research to help companies understand consumers’ privacy choices. Learn more about her award-winning dissertation:
@TesaryLin
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THREAD Recently, we updated our privacy paper that examines the AdChoices self-regulation program that lets consumers opt out of behavioral ads.
"Consumer privacy choice in online advertising: Who opts out and at what cost to industry?”
1/
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If you are a grad student struggling to write your dissertation, the first draft can be pretty shit and things can still work out nicely.
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NBER IT & Digitization conference is Th & Fr and will be livestreamed at .
Full Schedule:
I will present our research on
#GDPR
's impact on concentration:
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Flight attendant: Is there a doctor on the flight?
Dad: *nudging me* that should've been you
Me: Not now Dad
Dad: Not asking for a PhD economist to help, are they?
Me: Dad, there's a medical emergency happening right now
Dad: Go and see if “suppose I had a stethoscope” helps
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Today, I submitted a comment to the
@FTC
's proposed rulemaking on "Commercial Surveillance and Data Security." I focus on the online ad industry and its controversial use of cross-site/app identifiers. I summarize 3 key points below:
1/N
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Buried in this story about Google's search result, there's a super interesting anecdote about an (accidentally) long running experiment on Google that turned off paid search ads for 8 years for 1% of users!
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🚨New (short) working paper update!🚨
“Privacy-Centric Digital Advertising: Implications for Research” w/
@julian_runge
&
@eric_seufert
1/2
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For professors who are teaching online/hybrid, I highly recommend this video by Ayelet Israeli. The material is dense with tips & insight.
@HarvardHBS
is lucky to have such an exceptional researcher and educator!
#MarketingAcad
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My 🔥👿🔥Inferno🔥👿🔥 paper is now published online at Journal of Economics & Management Strategy!
🔥👿🔥 New working paper alert! 🔥👿🔥
"Inferno: A guide to field experiments in online display advertising"
THREAD: This guide reviews challenges & solutions from a decade of research.
#marketingacad
#econtwitter
#fieldexperiments
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As many of us have been saying for a long time, Apple had many motivations for its supposedly pro-privacy stance and altruism had little to do with it.
Again, we see this trade off between privacy and competition…
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So proud of my wife for winning this major award & a shout-out from the
@MassGovernor
within 2 yrs of us moving to Boston!! Her great partnership with
@stevepagliuca
filled a void in
#COVID
econ recovery thought-leadership. Megan is a tireless advocate for
#womenintheworkplace
Mass. High Tech Council 2020 Annual Meeting in progress: Council Members
@magreenfield
and
@stevepagliuca
just honored with the 2020 Ray Stata Leadership and Innovation award. Thank you Tom Colatosti
@OasisSystemsLLC
and Ray Stata for joining in the presentation.
#MHTC
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Underrated point: “Advertisers slowly acknowledge that measurement, not targeting, might be the bigger cookie deprecation challenge”
Curiously, Chrome’s Attribution Reporting API isn’t mentioned. Is ARA sufficiently on advertisers’ radar?
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(Steak-ummm) bless this meta-comment on social media marketing done poorly.
gonna start reaching out to people with viral tweets for them to advertise our frozen beef sheets in the replies
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I'm getting retargeted by ads about the incrementality of retargeted ads.
#MetaAF
#dreamscometrue
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Good to see this important issue get a thorough treatment by 2 academics: Daniel Sokol & Feng Zhu.
"Harming Competition and Consumers under the Guise of Protecting Privacy: An Analysis of Apple’s iOS 14 Policy Updates"
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Join me for a public discussion hosted by
@BUQuestrom
on the future of digital advertising after cookies. Register here:
#Questrom
#DigitalMarketing
#PrivacySandbox
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Test & Roll: An experimental design to maximize profit from A/B Tests
Very nice write-up by
@marketsensei
!
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I thank my BIPOC colleagues for their time & courage in sharing their reflections on DEI in academic marketing today. This is an exhausting time to do so, and I got a lot out of listening. Thanks also to my women colleagues for leading this work: Raji Srinivasa &
@ce_tucker
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Does 1+1 > 2 when platforms merge? 🧵on
@jessicayfong
paper (w/
@AndreyFradkin
& Chiara Farronato) presented at today's QME conference.
"Dog Eat Dog🐶: Measuring Returns to Scale Using a Digital Platform Merger"
Paper here: ttps://andreyfradkin.com/assets/rover_draft.pdf 1/6
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"While business experimentation is — rightfully — framed as a gold standard by scholars and leading practitioners, [...] Only 12.6% of the 6,777 companies we looked at had conducted a recent RCT"
by
@julian_runge
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In this 11 min
@BUQuestrom
video, I explain our award-winning Ghost Ads research describing a better way to run ad effectiveness experiments and its broad adoption by practitioners.
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Struck by the similarities between the distributions (& precision) of ad effect estimates between our display ad experiments paper (LEFT) & the
@btshapir
,
@tuchmanna
,
@Guenter_Hitsch
TV ads border strategy paper (RIGHT).
Credit to them for the
#GenderRevealParty
color scheme 😉
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The zoom transcript of my class last night was even more exciting than the actual class!
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Google just released a more details about the study showing *publisher revenue* falls 52% without a cookie. They run an experiment disabling cookies for a random sample of users on Google Ad Manager's top 500 publishers in terms of programmatic revenue. 1/
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Periodic reminder that Cambridge Analytica was really overblown. Must read!
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Thrilled to share the good news that my coauthor Sam accepted a job at Stanford!!!!! 🍾 🍾🍾
(1/2) Well folks, I got big news! Unbelievably excited to announce that I will be joining the incredible group at Stanford GSB as an AP in 2022. Now that I have a job you'll get to see me goof off more around these parts.
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We just released a revision of our paper examining how the
#GDPR
affected the site traffic💻 & ecommerce revenue💶 of EU users.
We overhauled the paper, but its main message is the same. Read more in the thread 👇👇👇
Link:
Happy 3rd birthday🎂 of the
#GDPR
🇪🇺!
🧵We recently released a big update to our working paper examining how the
#GDPR
affected the site traffic💻 & ecommerce revenue💶 of EU users. (w/
@samgarvingold
& Scott Shriver) 1/11 (image: Digiday)
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This is a great paper showing why StubHub gave up on “all in” pricing. I teach in class.
Very interesting paper by Blake, Moshary, Sweeney,
@steve_tadelis
in the latest issue of MktgSc on drip pricing which sadly seems to work. I really like the use of search data to show how obfuscation affects the process leading up to a purchase.
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I’ve written at least 3 of these papers 😂
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Re-upping my research advice as PhD students shift attention to their summer papers. I recently added a new section on academic writing.
#MarketingAcad
#econtwitter
I've created a succinct list of my advice regarding research aimed at PhD students. The advice many of us get is simply "do research" 😉
#MarketingAcad
#econtwitter
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Wow 😮 Big news 🍪
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Chilling but excellent paper showing Chinese 🇨🇳comparative advantage in facial recognition AI, greater exports to autocracies and weak democracy, and greater exports during periods of domestic unrest.
#privacy
#surveillance
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Excited to present our
#GDPR
& concentration paper Monday as part of VQMS. Thanks to the organizers for the opportunity & for creating this fantastic seminar series!
#MarketingAcad
Proud of our lineup into the fall for the Virtual Quant Marketing Seminar — & there may even yet be further additions!
Head to to sign up for the mailing list and/or subscribe to the Google calendar.
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🧵Our paper on AdChoices and the value of the cookie 🍪 is now published online at Marketing Science. Media release here:
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@rushkoff
Ads work. Here's a plot from 432 ad experiments showing lift estimates.
The real message here is that advertisers (should) care about ROI but ad effects are difficult to cleanly measure & so imprecise that ads are hard to optimize. cc:
@jessefrederik
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So proud of my amazing wife
@magreenfield
who is one of 113 people around the world selected for the
@wef
's Young Global Leader program this year. I'm sure you will take your incredible impact on the people around you to yet another level!
#marryup
Incredibly humbled to join
@WEF
's Young Global Leaders Class of 2021!
@YGLvoices
brings together globally diverse leaders for a 5 yr leadership program. Couldn't be more inspired by their mission to build a more inclusive and sustainable future.
#ygl21
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Great piece!
"This article was written by
@professor_ajay
,
@joshgans
,
@avicgoldfarb
, and
#ChatGPT
. Yes, ChatGPT helped write what you just read. We wrote a draft and requested ChatGPT to “Re-write the following essay in a more interesting way.” It did."
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I recently updated my paper 🔥👿🔥"Inferno: A guide to field experiments in online display advertising."🔥👿🔥 Nothing major: added & updated references + improved some things.
See paper link & cool thread below 👇
🔥👿🔥 New working paper alert! 🔥👿🔥
"Inferno: A guide to field experiments in online display advertising"
THREAD: This guide reviews challenges & solutions from a decade of research.
#marketingacad
#econtwitter
#fieldexperiments
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We are hiring at the tenured associate level!!
Questrom Professorship, Associate Chair in Boston, MA for Boston University Questrom School of Business
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Best costume of Halloween goes to 🥁
What could be scarier than global shipping logistics issues...Happy Halloween!
#evergiven
#everstuck
#suezcanal
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Part II of
@jessefrederik
&
@mauritsmartijn
's deep dive into online advertising discusses fraud, flawed metrics, brand safety, & ad blocking. 1/2
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A thread at the intersection of the 3 most interesting topics in the world🌍:
#Privacy
,
#DigitalAdvertising
,
#IncrementalityTesting
.
TL.DR: Take care that cookie🍪 replacements don’t bias your ad incrementality tests. 1/10
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@Iwillleavenow
Almost all research on this subject, including our own peer-reviewed research suggests large increases (i.e. 2X or 3X) in ad-generated revenue from cookies & other identifiers in ads. See thread below and attached slides for details.
Does behavioral targeting create value? Now, we have 5 academic & industry (grey) studies that quantify how much value is lost without cookies. The loss estimates are: 65%, >66%, 52%, 4%, & 52%. I summarize the studies below.
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Here’s a great list of resources & papers on
#incrementality
(causal ad effectiveness) measurement!
Proud to have authored 3 things on the list 🙂 1/2
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Had the pleasure of speaking at
@CFPB
in DC yesterday. Really smart group doing important consumer protection research. Thanks to the research group there and especially my host Joe Harvey.
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Kudos to my new colleague
@florianederer
for shining must needed light in a very dark place.
🚨NEW PAPER🚨
"Anonymity and Identity Online"
We geolocate the majority of EJMR posters and show that posting on EJMR is wide-spread at US universities and also frequent in other organizations employing economists.
Presentation at NBER SI (7/20/2023):
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Apple's ATT continues to have divergent effects on mobile ads. Facebook & Google had to take Apple's power grab, so their advertisers get the full impact. Elsewhere, fingerprinting is muting ATT's effect on the rest of the market...
@AdExchanger
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Recently, I did a podcast with the Boston Business Journal
"Questrom marketing researcher discusses personalized ads, trade-offs between privacy and the growth of online businesses"
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