Google and WPP Marketing Research Awards
So, this is exciting, huh?
Google and the WPP Group have launched the 2nd round of the research program they jointly created to improve understanding and practices in online marketing, and to better understand the relationship between online and offline media. The Google and WPP Marketing Research Awards Program expects to support up to 25 awards in the range from $50,000 to $80,000. Awards will be in the form of unrestricted gifts to academic institutions, under the names of the researchers who submitted the proposal. Award recipients will be invited to participate in a meeting highlighting work in this area and will be encouraged to make their results available online and in professional publications.
Google’s comprehensive approach to their business is brilliant. They don’t stop at hiring only the best and the brightest to address their current needs and develop new solutions but they also reach out to academia to fund research into the future of their industry. Google and WPP won’t own the research outright but they will obviously have a leg up on everyone else when it comes to leveraging the results and funding further research.
Topics they expect to cover in the first round include:
- Online and offline media interaction
- Relevance and effectiveness measurement
- Audience types and engagement
- Verticals & New Media
Google and WPP are making a huge amount of proprietary data available to the researchers to aid in their exploration of these issues. What a dream for data junkies.
A list of the projects, researchers, and institutions being supported in the first round of the program can be found here.
The video below introduces the program and some of the research that is going on:
