Google and WPP award media research grants

UK-- Google and WPP have made eleven research grants to universities as part of a programme supporting research into how online media influences consumer behaviour.

The grants, to be released this month, are the first round of awards in the three-year programme. Applications will be accepted for a second round later this year.

The firms say they expect to commit a total of up to $4.6m over the course of the programme.

The eleven projects, selected from more than 120 entries, will look at areas including the effect of online exposure on offline buying, differences in the effectiveness of internet advertising for established and niche brands, and how consumers determine what material is relevant when searching online.

Nine of the eleven awards went to universities in the US, with one going to the University of Toronto and one to Beijing's Tsinghua University.

Google's chief economist Dr Hal Varian, who sits on the committee overseeing the programme, said: “The winning projects offer convincing designs to explore how online and offline marketing influence consumer attitudes, decisions and purchase behaviour. As marketing continues to become more digital and more measurable, the results of these studies would also advance our understanding of how advertising investment should be allocated among media channels.”

The selected projects are:

• ‘Effect of Online Exposure on Offline Buying: How Online Exposure Aids or Hurts Offline Buying by Increasing the Impact of Offline Attributes'; Amitav Chakravarti, New York University, Stern School of Business, Department of Marketing

• ‘The Interaction Between Digital Marketing Tactics and Sales Performance Online and Offline'; Elie Ofek, Associate Professor Marketing, Harvard Business School and Zsolt Katona, Associate Professor of Marketing, UC Berkeley, Haas School of Business

• ‘Are Brand Attitudes Contagious? Consumer Response to Organic Search Trends'; Donna L. Hoffman, Professor, A. Gary Anderson Graduate School of Management, University of California Riverside and Thomas P. Novak, A. Gary Anderson Graduate School of Management, University of California Riverside

• ‘Does Internet Advertising Help Established Brands or Niche (‘Long Tail') Brands More?' Catherine Tucker, Assistant Professor of Marketing, MIT Sloan School of Marketing and Avi Goldfarb, Associate Professor of Marketing, Joseph L. Rotman School of Management University of Toronto

• ‘Marketing on the Map: Visual Search and Consumer Decision Making'; Nicolas Lurie, Assistant Professor of Marketing, College of Management, Georgia Institute of Technology, College of Management and Sam Ransbotham, Assistant Professor of Information Systems, Carroll School of Management, Boston College

• ‘Methods for Multivariate Metric Analysis; Identifying Change Drivers'; Trevor J. Hastie, Professor, Department of Statistics, Stanford University

• ‘Unpuzzling the Synergy of Display and Search Advertising: Insights from Data Mining of Chinese Internet Users'; Hairong Li, Department of Advertising, Public Relations, and Retailing, Michigan State University and Shuguang Zhao, Media Survey Lab, Tsinghua University

• ‘Optimal Allocation of Offline and Online Media Budget'; Sunil Gupta, Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School; Anita Elberse, Associate Professor, Harvard Business School; and Kenneth C. Wilbur, Assistant Professor of Marketing, Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California

• ‘Targeting Ads to Match Individual Cognitive Styles: A Market Test'; Glen Urban, Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management

• ‘How do consumers determine what is relevant? A psychometric and neuroscientific study of online search and advertising effectiveness'; Antoine Bechara, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, Department of Psychology/Brain & Creativity Institute, University of Southern California and Martin Reimann, Fellow, Department of Psychology/Brain & Creativity, University of Southern California

• ‘A Comprehensive Model of the Effects of Brand-Generated and Consumer-Generated Communications on Brand Perceptions, Sales and Share'; Douglas Bowman and Manish Tripathi, Professors of Marketing, Goizueta Business School, Emory University

Author: Robert Bain

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Google and WPP to fund research grants