We discuss how regression discontinuity designs arise naturally in settings where firms target marketing activity at consumers, and discuss how this aspect may be exploited for econometric inference of causal effects of marketing effort. Our main insight is to use commonly observed discreteness...

Presidential elections provide both an important context in which to study advertising and a setting that mitigates the challenges of dynamics and endogeneity. We use the 2000 and 2004 general elections to analyze the effect of market-level advertising on county-level vote shares. The results...

We document that recent quasi-experimental strategies for identifying advertising effects can be derived from a model in which ad decisions are made at a more aggregate level than conversion is measured. Next, we show that the identifying variation in one of these strategies, the Border...