Memos on the Marketing Science Conference

Given the location, the majority of attendants were from Chinese universities, and only a relatively small number of US and European colleagues attended the conference. The organization was excellent.

While firms tend to reduce their breakthrough innovations after going public, we offer a set of strategic firm buffers that help firms maintain their breakthrough innovations after the IPO.

I attended a talk of a project with very demanding data collection requirements and learnt about ways to make my own data collection more efficient.

I was impressed by the work that Rajesh Chandy and colleagues were doing in developing countries about microfinancing and micromarketing.

China particularities, a new journal set-up by INFORMS, the next conference

I deliberately went to a number of sessions not related to my core research interest which I liked a lot and which might reflect on my research in the future.

Neither firms nor consumers benefit if consumers have higher time preferences (higher discount rates) than firms.

Not any specific one. However, personally, I found the quality of presented papers at “Gary Lilien Practice Price Competition Presentations” higher than other presentations which I attended. The presentations were well prepared and looking at real-world problems.

Personally, mostly integration and getting familiar with the other researchers.

Motivation, recent hot/popular topics, such as mobile marketing, and some modeling ideas.

The impact mobile devices have on conversion is higher then what might be expected when looking at the direct conversion rate. This is because mobile devices are mainly used in an early stage on the path to purchase. Using mobile devices in this stage has a positive interaction with non-mobile device used in later stages.

“How Do TV Ads Drive Search Spikes: Second-screen Behavior” by Rex Yuxing Du, Raymond Pettit, Kenneth Wilbur, Linli Xu. The nice thing about this study is that it clearly demonstrates how you can use online data to get real-time feedback on offline campaigns, which you can directly relate to things like firm performance.

Various, from the content of the previous sessions to socializing and networking

No direct take aways, but that it is a growing field with much to contribute

The usage of hard- and soft-floor prices in real-time adverting can be used to increase publisher’s profit substantially. However, currently advertisers barely react to floor prices.

Nico Neumann. He is a practitioner who was active in academia for quite a while. He is very familiar with real-time advertising and thus could give me valuable feedback on my projects. 

Big data is a “Buzz-Word” that is still discussed widely.

Real-time bidding is still experiencing growing popularity. Thus, it remains a promising research area.

In marketing the idea is ubiquitous that not all available alternatives are considered when consumers figure out their utility maximizing action in a product category. We show how discrete continuous choices provide moments that can be used to identify covariates that drive consideration only and thus define a process that precedes utility maximization given a consideration set.

A higher percentage of participants from Asia. Fewer Americans, about the same number of Europeans as usual.

“Ghost Ads:  Improving the Economics of Measuring Ad Effectiveness”, presented by Garrett Johnson (U. of Rochester). Electronic field experiments usually result in a control group that is potentially exposed to public service announcements.  A much better control group is created by the ad auction outcome resulting from the target advertiser pulling out of the auction.

All over the place. A very interesting discussion I had was about the dilution of research quality through rankings or other reward mechanisms that are based on counting publications, even if they appear in top journals.

It pays off to organize topical sessions at Marketing Science.