This article relies on advertising and persuasive communications theories to uncover persistent variations in investor response to television stock recommendations targeting naive investors. The authors use an event study methodology to determine the size of the next-day abnormal market reaction to recommendations on Mad Money with Jim Cramer.Although viewers are actively looking for recommendations, the results show that any individual recommendation is still subject to many of the same communication challenges as traditional advertisements. A regression analysis finds that traditional advertising variables, such as message length, recency–primacy effects, information clutter, and source credibility, influence the size of the market reaction to a “buy” recommendation. The authors discuss implications for marketers, managers of public companies, and those interested in public policy aspects related to televised stock recommendations.

This article examines the economic worth of product placement in movies over a time span of 40 years (1968–2007). The authors find an inverted U-shaped relationship between the year of the movie release and the returns associated with product placements. In addition, a similar inverted U-shaped relationship characterizes the economic worth of tie-in campaigns associated with product placements. These findings are consistent with the habituation–tedium theory used to explain the inverted U-shaped pattern in response to novel advertisements and suggest that the same mechanism could be influencing the response to an entire marketing medium. Overall, the results reinforce the notion that marketers find it increasingly difficult to get their message across using traditional media and underscore the need for the marketing industry to reinvent itself when new tactics lose their luster. The authors conclude with a discussion of additional empirical regularities.