Prof. Johnson researches digital marketing: measuring its effectiveness and examining its privacy issues. His ad effectiveness research uses large-scale experiments to measure how and how much ads work. His privacy research examines the impact of Europe’s GDPR, the policy tradeoffs of user identifiers like cookies, as well as novel, privacy-centric approaches to online advertising.
For his work, Prof. Johnson has been awarded the Paul Green Award, the John D. C. Little Award and the Weitz-Winer-O’Dell Award, and has been a finalist for the John D. C. Little Award, Robert D. Buzzell MSI Best Paper Award, and Gary Lilien Marketing Science Practice Prize. His work has appeared in top academic journals, such as American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Journal of Marketing Research, Management Science, Marketing Science, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He has appeared in outlets including Bloomberg, Boston Globe, Fortune, HBR Ideacast, Marketplace, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal.