TV advertising belief updating experiment

Trial Information

General Information

Title

RCT ID

AEARCTR-0017849

Initial registration date

March 03, 2026

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published

March 10, 2026, 10:11 AM EDT

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Locations

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Primary Investigator

Name

Martina Pocchiari

Affiliation

Esade Business School

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Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Name

Clement Bellet

PI Affiliation

Erasmus University

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Additional Trial Information

Status

In development

Start date

2026-03-03

End date

2026-03-27

Keywords

Behavior, Gender

Additional Keywords

advertising, marketing

JEL code(s)

Secondary IDs

Prior work

This trial is based on or builds upon one or more prior RCTs.

Abstract

We will elicit beliefs about product usage from people who work in marketing capacity in the US. We will then correct those beliefs with true usage figures obtained from a representative survey of the US population. We will measure whether belief-correction interventions change the creative choices made by marketing professionals in the design of TV advertising.

External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation

Bellet, Clement and Martina Pocchiari. 2026. "TV advertising belief updating experiment." AEA RCT Registry. March 10. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.17849-1.0

Sponsors & Partners

Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)

Participants are randomly assigned to one of two conditions:
1) An information (treatment) condition: participants receive factual information about the true gender composition of product users in the assigned market.
2) A control condition: participants do not receive any factual information and proceed directly to the creative selection task.

In addition, participants are randomly assigned to one of four product markets. Each participant completes the survey for only one market.

Intervention Start Date

2026-03-08

Intervention End Date

2026-03-11

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)

The primary outcomes are the gender representation choices of advertisers, measured as gender presence (man/men, woman/women, both, neither) and as gender-typing of advertising context.

Primary Outcomes (explanation)

For the first outcome, we create an indicator for whether at least one woman, one man, both, or neither are selected as featured characters.

For the second outcome, participants are asked to select five creative elements (tags) from a predefined, market-specific list of 60 tags. The market and tag selection procedures are explained in question 8. Each tag has a gender-typing coefficient between -1 and 1 that captures the extent from which it is male-typed, female-typed or neutral (this value is not disclosed to respondents). For each participant, we then construct the gender-typing of advertising context as the sum of all gender-typing coefficients of the five selected tags, where higher values indicate more masculine-typed content and lower values indicate more feminine-typed content.

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)

Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

Participants are randomly assigned to one of two conditions:
1) An information (treatment) condition: participants receive factual information about the true gender composition of product users in the assigned market.
2) A control condition: participants do not receive any factual information and proceed directly to the creative selection task.

In addition, participants are randomly assigned to one of four product markets. Each participant completes the survey for only one market.

True gender usage gaps by product markets are generated using data from a previous pre-registered study.

The selection procedure of product markets and tags is explained in detail in the paper attached to this pre-registered experiment.

Additional survey questions (e.g., demographics, professional background) are collected for descriptive and exploratory purposes only and are not part of the primary analysis.

Experimental Design Details

Not available

Randomization Method

Randomization performed by Qualtrics survey software

Randomization Unit

Individual

Was the treatment clustered?

No

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters

no clusters

Sample size: planned number of observations

We plan to collect responses from 2000 individuals. Data collection will stop either once this target is reached or when the allocated recruitment budget is exhausted. Participants will be approximately evenly split across treatment and control conditions and across the four product markets. We screen participants according to 2 quotas: 1) Resident in the USA 2) Decision-making responsibilities in Marketing/sales/advertising

Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms

not applicable

Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)

Supporting Documents and Materials

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