Using mixture‐amount modeling to optimize the advertising media mix and quantify cross‐media synergy for specific target groups

One of the critical decisions in media planning is how to allocate advertising efforts across different media. While studies indicate that marketers can create positive synergy effects by spreading their effort across several media, there is little understanding of how much should be invested in each specific medium to optimize advertising results. In this study, we apply a novel methodology, mixture‐amount modeling, which allows advertisers to determine the optimal allocation of advertising effort across media as a function of the total advertising effort. Moreover, we test how the optimal allocation and the resulting response change for consumers with distinctive media usage patterns and varying degrees of product category experience. Based on these results, we quantify the potential synergy between media and calculate the synergistic capacity for specific target groups. We apply the model to data from 52 beauty care advertising campaigns that ran on TV and in magazines in the Netherlands and Belgium. We determine the optimal allocation of advertising investments (measured through Gross Rating Points) to maximize campaign recognition. Our findings support the existence of positive synergistic effects between magazine and TV advertising and illustrate that these effects depend on consumers' media usage and product category experience.