Junior Faculty Fellow Informs Online Privacy with Economics & Marketing

BY GINA MANTICA & DEIRDRE SHAHAR

An economist by training, Junior Faculty Fellow Garrett Johnson became interested in digital marketing during his graduate studies. Once Johnson realized the impact his work could have on internet users, he stayed on that path ever since. Now, he applies data science and computing to his research as an Assistant Professor of Marketing at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business.

His digital marketing journey took off while receiving his PhD in Economics at Northwestern University. During this time, Johnson interned at Yahoo and completed a giant experiment measuring the effects of advertising over millions of people. “These digital markets are really interesting to economists,” said Johnson.

This internship sparked Johnson’s interest in the marketing world, and he later went on to develop a digital marketing research methodology called “ghost ads” along with his collaborators at Google. Ghost ads make it cheap and easy for marketers to run ad experiments at scale and understand an ad’s potential effectiveness for increasing sales. Johnson and his colleagues first implemented this methodology at Google. Now, ghost ads are broadly adopted in industry and are used by companies like Netflix and Pandora.

At BU, Johnson combines his background in economics and marketing with his interest in law and computer science – enabling the development of new, intersectional research methods and analyses. “It’s kind of neat that my work is becoming more interdisciplinary,” he said.

Johnson’s ongoing project looks at the effects of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which can help users make informed decisions when it comes to managing their right to privacy on the internet. The GDPR imposes regulations on organizations around the world that collect data from people in the European Union – data that many advertisers use for personalized marketing in ads and emails. Along with colleagues at the University of Colorado at Boulder and Northwestern University, Johnson investigated whether the GDPR affects the types of vendors that websites use for support. The team found that just a week after the policy went into effect, websites dropped small vendors in favor of larger vendors that use personal data collected from cookies, like companies owned by Facebook or Google. The team also partnered with Adobe to investigate how GDPR affects over 1,000 websites. Johnson’s big data analysis revealed that after GDPR, the recorded number of pageviews to websites fell significantly, along with their recorded revenue. Though the GDPR protects individual’s privacy, these findings suggest that the effects of the GDPR on personalized marketing negatively impacts websites and small vendors. “We as a society are really grappling hard with how to have privacy, but still live in the data economy,” said Johnson.

This research has spurred conversations around the value of cookies and personalized ads. And with Google planning to end its support of third-party cookies in 2023, Johnson hopes that decisions made by companies and regulators to rethink or rebuild online advertising are informed by good research. “I think we’re really at a crossroads moment right now, when it comes to digital advertising, and deciding how to move forward as a society,” he said. Johnson’s research at the intersection of economics and digital marketing can inform online privacy and help build a better, safer internet for all.

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