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• Position: YOUR LIFE - Brief article

Browsing the Internet while watching TV is a great way to kill time during commercial breaks, but are advertisers losing out if consumers surf while the commercials roll? Not according to a researcher at Duke University, Durham, N.C., who found commercials influence the terms people use to search on websites like Google and Bing. "Advertising on TV changes what people search for. We use more branded keywords and fewer generic ones," points out Ken Wilbur, professor of marketing.

If a viewer is looking for a financial planner and sees a TV advertisement for Fidelity, he or she is more likely to search for a branded term such as "Fidelity" than for a generic term such as "financial planning." However, advertising does not increase the number of searches in a product category, nor does it make people more likely to click through on the results.

According to a study by Nielsen and Yahoo!, three out of four...