AEM 4550

Attention Markets and Advertising Strategy

Course Description

Course information provided by the 2026-2027 Catalog.

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.

Prerequisites AEM 2600 or equivalent.

Forbidden Overlaps AEM 4550, AEM 5550

Last 4 Terms Offered 2026SP, 2025SP, 2024SP, 2023SP

Learning Outcomes

• 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.

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