Week 11: The Final Verdict & Reflections

Welcome back for the last time, advertisement analysts! After months of collecting data, building graphs, evaluating correlations, and running t-tests, it’s finally time to bring everything back together and answer the questions that began this project.

What the Data Displayed

Across all six comparisons of advertising airtime against search frequency and Reddit post frequency, only Ozempic produced statistically significant results. Its t-statistics of 2.266 and 2.559 both exceeded the critical value of 2.074, confirming that the relationship between advertising airtime and public engagement is significant and not by chance. In contrast, SKYRIZI and DUPIXENT did not clear the critical value across all comparisons, and their negative t-values suggest that higher airtime months aligned with lower online activity for those drugs.

The R² values displayed the same type of story. Even Ozempic’s strongest values of 0.189 and 0.229 indicated that advertising airtime accounts for less than 25% of the variation in its public engagement metrics. For SKYRIZI and DUPIXENT, the extremely low R² values suggest that online activity for these drugs is driven almost entirely by external factors, likely patient communities and other word-of-mouth discussions.

General Conclusions

Ozempic’s stronger results likely are attributed to its unique cultural presence. From its celebrity endorsements to expansive media coverage, the broader public conversation surrounding weight loss drugs gives Ozempic added visibility that amplifies the effect which advertising produces. SKYRIZI and DUPIXENT, as slightly more niche condition-specific drugs, did not have the same cultural presence, which the data reflects.

These findings also very broadly align with prior research. From my Week 2 post, Robinson et al. (2004) noted that DTC advertising can increase public awareness, but its effects are limited. Other findings noted that most DTC ads provide little information about disease cause or risk factors, which helps explain why less culturally prominent drugs can’t gain as much public engagement from solely advertising. Meanwhile, Mintzes et al.’s (2003) connection between advertising exposure and prescription requests is consistent with Ozempic being the only drug to show a positive airtime vs. sales correlation; however, clearly external market factors play a significant role.

To answer the question on whether online metrics offer a more effective method for analyzing DTC advertising’s effects compared to traditional survey-based methods, these results provide some support and contradictory perspectives. Tracking Google searches and Reddit post activity on a monthly basis allowed for a better more real-time view of how public engagement responds to advertising that other surveys can’t specifically replicate. Still, at the same time, online metrics capture digital engagement rather than true awareness, and they also can’t capture the effect of external events.

Final Product

If you are interested in viewing the final research paper with all the precise data I’ve collected all in one place, please feel free to read more about my findings through the link below:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wy8lDRCeH0CaaAIas_Z1EZzY1tYBK0yl/view?usp=sharing

Reflections

Looking back to my first blog post, it’s clear that what started as a straightforward question about advertising and awareness quickly revealed itself to be far more complex than anticipated. My assumption going in was that more advertising would definitely mean more public engagement, a prediction that the data only partially supported for one of the three drugs in the end. Working through data collection, correlation analysis, and statistical tests not only produced unexpected findings but also displayed how much external factors like cultural visibility and media presence can overshadow the direct effects of advertising. This project reinforced that real-world situations rarely fit into a single explanatory conclusion, and that choosing to measure public awareness through digital behavioral data opened up a more nuanced view of how advertising actually functions in the first place.

Thank you for accompanying me on this journey through these weeks across the past months! I hope this enlightening project has shown you all that the relationship between advertising and public awareness is anything and everything but a straight line.