Friday, January 30, 2009

Advertisment as a game of chance

Let there be no doubt: Ads are a gamble. Their purpose is to increase the chance someone buys your product. I realized this only when i red Seth Godin's thought: "If your ads work throw all the money on them." I think he failed to understand that there can be no determinism between ads and turnover, since an ad is never (1) forcing someone to buy or (2) informing that there is a product fulfilling a desperate need. In both cases: p(ads)=1
What we see is: there is a correlation between ads and turnover. Especially you don't know if the campaign works until you try it, a.k.a. subjective probability. Therefore we should model advertisement as a probabilistic game. Therefore the Kelly Criterion is highly relevant.
Thank you for listening

No comments: