The article "Effects of Traditional Advertising and Social Messages on Brand-Building Metrics and Customer Acquisition?" by Dr. Lisette de Vries, Dr. Sonja Gensler and Prof Dr. Leeflang (University of Groningen) has been accepted for publication in Journal of Marketing.

This study examines the relative effectiveness of traditional advertising, impressions generated through firm-to-consumer (F2C) messages on Facebook, and the volume and valence of consumer-to-consumer (C2C) messages on Twitter and forums for brand-building and customer acquisition efforts. To a unique data set from a European telecom firm, the authors apply vector autoregressive modeling. This modelling approach allows considering the interrelations among traditional advertising, F2C impressions, volume and valence of C2C social messages. The results show that traditional advertising is most effective for both brand building and customer acquisition. Impressions generated through F2C social messages complement traditional advertising efforts. Thus, thoroughly orchestrating traditional advertising and a firm's social media activities may improve a firm's performance with respect to building the brand and enabling customer acquisition. Moreover, firms can stimulate the volume and valence of messages among consumers through traditional advertising that in turn affect brand building and acquisition. These findings help managers to leverage the different types of messages more adequately.