Multi-Objective Personalization of Marketing Interventions

Rafieian, Omid; Kapoor, Anuj; Sharma, Amitt

doi:10.2139/ssrn.4394969

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Multi-Objective Personalization of Marketing Interventions

55 Pages Posted: 30 Mar 2023 Last revised: 18 Oct 2024

See all articles by Omid Rafieian

Omid Rafieian

Cornell University - Cornell Tech NYC; Cornell SC Johnson College of Business

Anuj Kapoor

Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad

Marketing interventions usually affect multiple outcomes of interest. However, finding an intervention that improves all desired outcomes is often rare, creating a trade-off for managers and decision-makers. In this paper, we develop a multi-objective personalization framework that identifies personalized policies to balance multiple objectives at the individual level. We apply our framework to a canonical example of multi-objective conflict between sponsored and organic content consumption outcomes. Partnering with vdo.ai, we conduct a field experiment and randomly assign users to the Skippable/Long and Non-Skippable/Short versions of the same ad. We document substantial substitution between sponsored and organic content consumption: the version that increases sponsored consumption reduces organic consumption. We find that multi-objective personalized policies can significantly improve both sponsored and organic consumption outcomes over single-objective policies. We show that compared to a single-objective policy optimized for organic consumption, there exists a multi-objective policy that increases sponsored consumption by 61% at the expense of only a 4% decrease in organic consumption. Similarly, compared to the single-objective policy optimized for sponsored consumption, there is a multi-objective policy that increases organic consumption by 53% while decreasing sponsored consumption by just 15%.

Keywords: video advertising, ad skippability, multi-objective personalization, causal inference, machine learning, field experiments

JEL Classification: M31, M37, C93, C22

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Rafieian, Omid and Kapoor, Anuj and Sharma, Amitt, Multi-Objective Personalization of Marketing Interventions (March 21, 2023). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4394969 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4394969