What do you get when you cross Ph.D.’s in marketing with Ph.D.’s in computer science? Hopefully a $50,000 grant from Google and WPP.
The two companies recently announced the Google and WPP Marketing Research Awards Program to fund academic research in the following topics of interest:
- online and offline media interaction
- relevance and effectiveness measurement
- audience types and engagement
Research questions to be studied might include:
- How does offline media affect search and vice versa?
- How can you best coordinate search and banner ads?
- How do you set digital advertising budgets and tactics when in intensively competitive product categories?
- What is the causal relationship between brand health and search success?
- What is the ROI for digital media?
- Is online media more effective for Long Tail products rather than mainstream brands?
- How can advertisers participate meaningfully in increasingly personalized services such as specific verticals?
From the program’s web page:
We encourage creative theory development and empirical analysis to help solve marketing and advertising problems, so a wide range of methodologies and approaches are welcome. In order to facilitate research in these areas, Google and WPP will make available useful marketing data to qualified academics conducting research in this program.
Great opportunity for collaboration between marketing and computer science researchers and academics. We look forward to seeing the results of these studies.
