Leveraging Online Media and Online Marketing

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.

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.

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.

Accelerating Customer Engagement
Michael Metz, Cisco Systems, Inc
The Internet has gained increasing importance as a communication medium for business-to-business (B2B) as well as consumer markets. Cisco has traditionally focused on the enterprise market and associated services, and is now increasing its focus to include the small-and-medium business (SMB) arena through Cisco.com. This presentation summarized Cisco's marketing approach to using the Internet as an integrated tool in the company's communication mix.