Does the content of a news article influence the effectiveness of ads placed within it? In this episode, JMR Co-Editor Brett Gordon discusses the recently published paper, “Attention Spillovers from News to Ads: Evidence from an Eye-Tracking Experiment,” with authors Andrewy Simonov (Columbia Business School),Tommaso Valletti, and Andre Veiga (both from Imperial College Business School). The idea for the paper was born in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the researchers learned that some advertisers were using “block lists” to prevent their ads from appearing on publishers' websites with pandemic-related news content. Did the advertisers have a point? Or, they wondered, might this be based on a misunderstanding of how we, the audience, actually engage with content and the ads that appear alongside it?

We all likely know that there’s valuable data in our social media posts, but just how can this be used? In this episode, JMR Co-Editor Karen Winterich talks with Verena Schoenmueller and Simon Blanchard about their paper, “Who Shares Fake News? Uncovering Insights from Social Media Users’ Post Histories,” co-authored with Gita Johar. What started out as a collaboration to understand the spread of misinformation led them to uncover the value of social media post histories. While user post history can indeed be useful in predicting fake news sharers, it likely holds much more insight for which this paper’s multi-method approach may serve as a foundation.

Every business knows that customers who spend more in the past usually spend more in the future. But what if there are some products for which the opposite is true? That is, seeing a customer buy one of these categories means they are less–not more–likely to return to you. JMR Co-editor Brett Gordon speaks with Ayelet Israeli (HBS) and Eric Anderson (Kellogg) to learn about “canary categories,” as in “canary in a coalmine,” which predict exactly this type of behavior. Tune in to learn more about how the authors navigated a complex revision journey.