Conferences

Media for a World Online
Satish Korde, Global Client Director, WPP Group
What is the future of online media? In this presentation, Satish Korde challenged the conventional wisdom, laying out the key questions that marketing scientists must address if they are to truly leverage the global potential of online media. These questions—and the dialog they provoke—helped frame the discussion throughout the conference.

The Evolution of Customer Experience: 10 Trends You Can’t Afford to Miss
Donna L. Hoffman, University of California, Riverside
As Internet marketers gain more experience online, they are experimenting with an ever-widening array of site features and marketing programs to drive customers to the site and improve conversion rates. But what do consumers see as the top priorities for the shopping experience—and what will the future hold? Based on research conducted at the UCR Sloan Center for Internet Retailing, Professor Hoffman identified the strategies that are most effective now and looked into her research crystal ball to predict—from the consumer perspective—what lies ahead.

It’s 2015: Where Have All the Legacy Media Gone and How Do We Sell Stuff to People?
Esther Thorson, University of Missouri-Columbia
We are awash in stories about how the digital revolution has made the legacy media world so undecipherable and uncompetitive that its very life is endangered. We hear that the newspaper industry is in collapse. Only one in four young Americans can name all four broadcast networks. If myspace were a country it would be the 11th largest in the world. In 2006 college students rated their iPods as more important to them than beer. 57% of youth are content creators. The top ten jobs likely to be most in demand in 2010 did not exist in 2004. (For more, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljbI-363A2Q and http://blogoscoped.com/videos/epic-2015.html) It seems, in the famous words of William James, “one great blooming, buzzing confusion.” Is there a simple straightforward way to understand this sea change so that news and advertising, at least in some form, can survive? The presentation brought together scholarly and applied research in a way that provides a start toward that understanding.

Practical Advice for Traditional Marketers in a Digital World
Andrew Markowitz, Director of Digital Marketing and Media, Kraft Foods, Inc.
Andrew Markowitz discussed how Kraft is evolving its marketing practices to meet the needs of consumers in a digitally-enabled world. He offered practical advice based on his experiences in providing marketing teams across Kraft’s diverse brand portfolio with new tools, new partnerships, and new competencies.

Assessing the Pay-off from Paid Search Advertising
Randolph E. Bucklin, UCLA
Spending on Internet paid search advertising (the sponsored links served by search engines in response to user queries) continues to advance at a rapid rate. With this growth comes the need to assess the productivity of the dollars allocated to paid search. Professor Bucklin discussed metrics firms can use to assess the pay-off from spending on this fast-growing form of Internet advertising. He also introduced simple models designed to aid in this effort.

Panel Discussion
Moderator:
Rajeev Batra, University of Michigan
Panelists:
Deirdre Bigley, Vice President, Worldwide Advertising & Interactive, IBM Corporation
Jeanie Bunker, Senior Vice President, Customer Value and Online Advertising, Wells Fargo & Company
Scott C. McDonald, Senior Vice President, Market Research, Condé Nast Publications, Inc.

When Every Customer Is a Potential Brand Ambassador or a Lethal Brand Assassin: Winning in the New World of Consumer-Generated Content
Chrysanthos Dellarocas, University of Maryland
As consumers increasingly turn to Web postings, consumer ratings, and blogs for information on product and service offerings, research shows that the most influential Web postings occur spontaneously, are prompted by extreme (and sometimes non-representative) experiences, and are often contributed by first-time customers. When a single experience can turn a customer into an influential brand ambassador or a lethal brand assassin, management of online word-of-mouth must go beyond viral marketing and consumer-to-consumer referrals. In this wired “small world,” all operations have marketing implications, long-term reputational consequences may dwarf short-term yield management gains, and extreme, infrequent outcomes may produce the largest number of online reviews with the greatest impact on consumers. Drawing on research findings and real-world examples, Professor Dellarocas argued that the emergence of consumer content requires firms to rethink their entire approach to managing customer interactions, strategically engineering the mix of experiences they offer to customers with the goal of indirectly provoking the right mix of spontaneous consumer content.

Marketing 2.0: Accelerating Customer Engagement
Michael Metz, Senior Director, Web Marketing and Strategy, Cisco Systems, Inc.
We have extraordinary new capabilities available to us as marketers today. The web 2.0 explosion has unleashed a torrent of new technologies, products and vendors that can bring us closer to our customers, at a pace and scale never before imagined. Evaluating and implementing these new capabilities can be challenging. How do we place a value on user-generated content such as comments, forums, conversations, product reviews and content rating? Which of the new capabilities are most effective in furthering our customer relationships? How exactly do we measure effectiveness in this new world? New web marketing technologies provide opportunities that result in personalization, conversation, and collaboration that can greatly accelerate the rate of “customer engagement.” This customer engagement may become the new measure of online marketing effectiveness.

Panel Discussion
Moderator:
Donna L. Hoffman, University of California, Riverside
Panelists:
Brett Hurt, Founder & CEO, Bazaarvoice
Bruce Ertmann, Corporate Manager - Consumer Generated Media, Toyota Motor Corporation
Jessica Lilie, Vice President, Consumer Insights & Market Intelligence, BabyCenter, LLC

Will the Real Me Please Stand Up? An Exploration into Virtual vs. Physical Identity and Its Effect on Consumer Behavior
Ann E. Schlosser, University of Washington
Virtual worlds such as Second Life have experienced astonishing growth, thereby attracting the attention of such companies as H&R Block, Pontiac, American Apparel, and the American Cancer Society. As a consequence, it is critically important to understand how consumers use and are influenced by their experiences in virtual worlds. Professor Schlosser addressed these questions: (1) What effect (if any) do individuals’ virtual lives have on their offline (or “real”) lives? (2) What are the benefits and consequences of investing time and money on a virtual life? (3) How do individuals form relationships, including buyer-seller relationships, in these worlds?

Take My Word For It: How Consumers Evaluate Online Opinions
Andrew D. Gershoff, University of Michigan
The Internet has made it easy for consumers to access other people’s opinions before making a purchase. Many online merchants provide product reviews from other consumers, and some websites are dedicated to sharing opinions and product evaluations. But this doesn’t mean that consumers are making better product choices. Just who consumers listen to, and how they use this information is the topic of this discussion. Results from research dealing with evaluation of recommenders, advice givers, and expert systems were discussed.

eLab City: A Platform for Consumer Behavior Research in Virtual Worlds
Thomas Novak, University of California, Riverside
eLab City is a multi-function 3D simulation in Second Life that will be constructed in Spring 2008 by the UCR Sloan Center for Internet Retailing as a working laboratory environment and research platform for the study of virtual consumption. Professor Novak described issues involved in constructing and maintaining this research platform, as well as approaches to data collection in this virtual world environment. He summarized current academic research related to virtual worlds and discussed a program of research that will use the eLab City platform.

An Empirical Analysis of Search Engine Advertising: Sponsored Search, Natural Search, and Cross-Selling in Electronic Markets
Anindya Ghose, New York University
The phenomenon of sponsored search advertising has now become the most predominant form of online advertising in the marketing world. Professor Ghose will discuss research that focuses on two related questions: How does sponsored search advertising affect consumer search and purchasing patterns on the Internet? Does the presence of natural search listings on a search engine complement or cannibalize sponsored search advertising? Using a unique panel dataset collected from a Fortune 500 firm that advertises on Google, the research empirically models the relationship between different metrics such as click-through rates, conversion rates, bid prices, and keyword ranks, using a hierarchical Bayesian modeling framework and Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods.

Real-Time Evaluation of Email Campaign Performance
Xavier Drèze, University of Pennsylvania
This presentation focused on a testing methodology that can be used to predict the performance of email marketing campaigns in real time. A splithazard model makes use of a time transformation (a concept we call virtual time) to allow for the estimation of straightforward parametric hazard functions and to generate early predictions of an individual campaign’s performance (as measured by open and click propensities). The pre-testing methodology, applied to 25 email campaigns, was able to produce in 1 hour and 15 minutes estimates that are more accurate and more reliable than what the traditional method (doubling time) can produce after 14 hours. In addition, this method makes testing independent of the time of day and produces meaningful confidence intervals. Thus, it can be used not only for testing purposes, but also for live monitoring. The testing procedure is coupled with a formal decision theoretic framework to generate a sequential testing procedure useful for the real-time evaluation of campaigns.

Does Chatter Matter
Vasant Dhar, New York University
How much value does user-generated content on the Internet really provide in terms of its ability to predict product sales, especially when compared to traditional sources of information from media companies? This research provides an answer to this question for online music sales by tracking the changes in online chatter for a sample of 108 albums, predicting their future sales two weeks ahead. Findings suggest that blogs matter, but that traditional factors are still relevant—albums released by major labels and albums with a number of reviews from mainstream sources like Rolling Stone also tended to have higher future sales. The study raises some useful questions for marketing managers interested in assessing the relative importance of the burgeoning number of “Web 2.0” information metrics that are becoming available on the Internet, and how looking at interactions among them could provide predictive value beyond viewing them in isolation.