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 and Gary Lilien Marketing Science Practice Prize. He has appeared in outlets including Bloomberg, New York Times, Boston Globe, Fortune, Marketplace, & the HBR Ideacast.