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Statement On Freakonomics Podcast ‘Does Advertising Actually Work? (Part 1:TV)’

/ November 24th 2020

The Freakonomics podcast ‘Does Advertising Actually Work? (Part 1:TV)’, includes selected parts of an interview with the Advertising Association President, Keith Weed, where he was making the case for advertising. The podcast is a deeply-flawed and one-sided presentation of a narrative against advertising. It ignores the many hundreds of professional studies into the efficacy of advertising and its use by millions of businesses around the world every day to support growth and job creation.

While it is good to challenge and refine learnings in this area, the implied conclusion that the millions of people who work in businesses and advertising are blindly using advertising because they do not understand what they are doing or know better is simply not true. Companies have access to internal data which they do not share publicly for competitive reasons. It does not mean the data does not exist, as Keith explains.

With all the economic challenges globally it is better to try to understand and leverage the positive impact of advertising on growth and jobs creation than undermine it with superficial one-sided analyses. We recommend anyone wishing to understand more about advertising and how it works to look beyond this podcast to widely available long-standing, proven research and thought leadership. Useful links for interested parties include:

Credos – Advertising’s Big Questions: https://adassoc.org.uk/credos-category/ad-big-qs/

The IPA’s Advertising Effectiveness: https://ipa.co.uk/initiatives/effectiveness

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