AEM 4550
Attention Markets and Advertising Strategy
Advertising is the main engine behind today’s largest digital platforms and a central force shaping what people see, click, buy, and believe. This course treats attention as a scarce resource and studies advertising as a three-sided market connecting consumers, advertisers, and platforms. The course is designed for anyone interested in platforms, media, tech, strategy, policy, or data, not only future marketers.
Topics
- Explain how attention markets work, and why advertising finances many products and platforms.
- Evaluate advertising strategies and competitive response based on core economics and strategy foundations.
- Interpret common advertising metrics (CPM, CPC, CPA, ROAS), and explain what they do and do not measure about performance and value.
- Use auctions and programmatic systems to allocate advertising in an environment with strategic and regulatory constraints.
- Design credible approaches to measuring advertising effectiveness, with an emphasis on causality, incrementality, and common confounders.
- Communicate insights from advertising data using clear quantitative reasoning and effective data visualizations to inform optimal advertising strategies.
Official roster learning outcomes
Prerequisites & course information
AEM 2600 or equivalent.
Sources
- Course catalogue ↗2026-2027
- Catalogue entry ↗
Catalogue variants
- Economics of Advertising · 3.0 · Undergraduate