The rise of management science in advertising

Over the past decade, the roles of Management Science and Operations Research in Advertising have grown, under the salient influence of computer methodology, from a modest experimental project state to a full scale systems state. The rate of growth manifests itself in (1) the size and complexity of problems being tackled, and (2) the widening sphere of techniques being brought in to use. The classic areas of Advertising Research such as Product, Consumer, Media, and Copy Research, defined as the Advertising-Marketing Complex, are availing themselves of the mathematical and statistical modeling techniques being designed throughout the entire research community of the world. Techniques such as mathematical programming, simulation, Bayesian analysis, multivariate analysis, and Markov analysis have become everyday production and research tools to the Advertising Industry. This paper will outline the growth and the current state of important areas of Advertising Research in relation to their involvement with Operations Research and Management Science.