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Information Content of Advertising: Theory and Empirical Evidence

We propose a theoretical model of advertising content, based on an informationpersuasion trade-off, where the “persuasive” content of an advertisement is defined as the content that is not objective information. Brands must allocate available time in an advertisement between imparting objective information about the product’s attributes and other persuasive methods. Our theoretical model gives rise to a structural ordered probit model, which we estimate with data from the OTC Analgesics Industry. We test four predictions of the model. We find that stronger vertical differentiation is positively associated with the delivery of more product information in a brand’s advertisements: Brands with higher levels of quality (on each of the quality dimensions for which we have data) will include more information cues in their advertisements. We also find that comparative advertisements contain significantly more product information relative to noncomparative advertisements. Brands with higher market shares and brands competing against generic substitutes with higher market shares have less information content in their advertising. The proposed method of measuring and analyzing information content of advertising extends and improves upon existing techniques for measuring advertising information.