Personalization
Also filed underPaid Media
Myth:The more personal an AI-generated ad looks, the better it will work.
Evidence:In a 100-person within-subject study across four products, moderately personalized AI imagery earned the best ad and product attitudes. At high personalization, rising creepiness outweighed the relevance benefit and neutralized gains across ad attitude, product attitude, and purchase intent.
This September 2026 preprint measures stated attitudes and purchase intent, not market sales. It also mixes the privacy reaction with visible limits of current image generation, so the exact optimum will move as creative quality improves.
Victor Kolominsky-Rabas, Leopold Müller, Claudius Budcke, Claas Christian Germelmann & Niklas Kühl, arXiv · 2026 · Academic
Channels: creative · personalization · ai
Budget Allocation
Myth:Performance marketing should get the majority of budget.
Evidence:Across hundreds of IPA case studies, roughly 60% brand / 40% activation maximises long-term profit growth in consumer categories.
The Validity Gap
Myth:TV's ROI estimates justify current spend levels.
Evidence:Estimating elasticities and ROI across 288 brands, Shapiro, Hitsch & Tuchman find ad elasticities far smaller than the published literature suggests, negative ROI at the margin for more than 80% of brands, and positive overall ROI for only about a third.
How Advertising Works
Myth:If ads don't move this week's sales, they didn't work.
Evidence:Across 751 short-term and 402 long-term elasticities from 56 studies (1960-2008), the average short-term advertising elasticity is 0.12 - but the mean long-term elasticity is 0.24, double the short-term, through carryover.
Penetration
Myth:Loyal heavy buyers are the growth engine.
Evidence:Brand growth comes overwhelmingly from increasing penetration among light and non-buyers, not from deepening loyalty.
Creative Effectiveness
Myth:Targeting and media buying determine campaign outcomes.
Evidence:Creative quality accounts for roughly half of advertising-driven sales variance — a larger share than any single media variable.
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