YALE DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS
WORKING PAPER NO. 58

What's Advertising Content Worth?  Evidence from a

Consumer Credit Marketing Field Experiment

Marianne Bertrand, Dean Karlan, Sendhil Mullainathan,

Edlar Shafir, and Jonathan Zinman

January 2009

Firms spend billions of dollars each year advertising consumer products in order to influence demand.  Much of these outlays are on the creative design of advertising content.  Creative content often uses nuances of presentation and framing that have large effects on consumer decision making in laboratory studies.  But there is little field evidence on the effect of advertising content as it compares in magnitude to the effect of price.  We analyze a direct mail field experiment in South Africa implemented by a consumer lender that randomized creative content and loan price simultaniously.  We find that content has significant effects on demand.  There is also some evidence that the magnitude of content sensitivity is large relative to price sensitivity.  However, it was difficut to predict which particular types of content would significantly impact demand.  This fits with a central premise of psychology - context matters - and highlights the importance of testing the robustness of laboratory findings in the field.

Keywords: economics of advertisiing, economics & psychology, behavioral economics, cues, microfinance

JEL Codes:  D01, M31, M37, C93, D12, D14, D21,D81, D91, O12