Many may jump to the conclusion that ‘Uninformative Advertising’
simply provides a route by which a manufacturing corporation can ‘burn
its money’ – but this may not always be the case, as explained in a recent
paper from the Yale School of Management.

 Professors Dina Mayzlin and Jiwoong Shin
have identified ways in which advertising that is deliberately devoid
of any attribute information can (sometimes) help to promote sales.

This can happen, according to the researchers, because consumers
seeing the uninformative ads are encouraged to search via the internet
to find the crucial missing info. Thus the consumer is “active”, and can
dig up reassuring positive information about the product on offer. 

To
consolidate their conjecture, the authors perform a series of highly
complex Bayesian equilibria analyses based around theoretical
informative and non-informative ads – revealing the strategic benefits
of under-informing consumers.

And in the real world, many companies are already reaping the advantages of under-informing – the authors cite the series of purposefully uninformative ads for Microsoft’s Windows Vista® as an example.

“While most of the previous literature has focused on the
decision to advertise (the mere fact that the firm is willing to burn
its money) as a signal of quality, we show that message content, coupled
with consumer search, can also serve as a credible signal of quality.”

Uninformative Advertising as an Invitation to Search is published in the journal Marketing Science, July 2011 vol. 30, no. 4 666-685.   (And can also be found in full here)

BONUS Quote attributed to John Wanamaker, considered by some to be the father of modern advertising :

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”