Developing a Group Decision Support System for Advertising Media Evaluation: A Case in the Middle East

The importance of advertising media evaluation as a multifaceted problem is well known by both academics and practitioners. Although previous studies tried to optimize media evaluation, there still are some gaps and problems to address, particularly in areas of flexibility of models/frameworks, decision making quality, tension management, and agility of the evaluation process. Most of previous studies are based on inflexible models/frameworks that have limitations on number of criteria/alternatives they can consider and type of data they can process. A great volume of the work used arbitrary decision making; arbitrary decision making regarding criteria and media importance may reduce effectiveness of advertising campaigns. Furthermore, the academic literature offers little guidance on group decision aggregation, and tension management during decision making is neglected. Media evaluation is a time taking process and any acceleration will reduce pre-campaign costs. The main aim of this paper is to illustrate how a group decision support system (GDSS) can assist media planners to overcome mentioned problems more systematically. For this purpose, we developed a GDSS that is an integration of three well-known multi-criteria decision making techniques. With a real world case study, we illustrate the performance of the proposed GDSS. Results of our quantitative assessments indicate that the GDSS is flexible, allows decision makers to express their opinions, reduces tension among decision makers, and saves time.