2025 MSI Webinar: Presentations, Recordings, and Summaries
February 4, 2025 | 12:00 pm – 12:30 pm ET
Speaker: Page Moreau, University of Wisconsin – Madison
Despite decades of growth in crowdsourcing contests, the core model has remained largely the same: companies encourage many submissions to select a few winners, often leaving the majority of ideas unused. For example, Lay’s received 2.8 million submissions for their “Do Us A Flavor” contest but awarded just one $1M…
February 25, 2025 | 12:00 pm – 12:30 pm ET
MSI Webinar: Price-Gouging Regulation in Response to Crisis: Causal Effects and Policy Implications
Speaker: Fred Feinberg, University of Michigan
Price gouging regulations (PGR) help keep essential goods—like medical supplies and groceries—affordable during crises. During COVID-19, PGR was widely used to prevent extreme price hikes, but there’s little guidance on how to design these policies for the best outcomes. This talk explores the effectiveness of different PGR approaches, including…
March 4, 2025 | 12:00 – 12:30 pm, ET
MSI Webinar: Contextual Advertising with Theory-Informed Machine Learning
Speaker: Jianping Ye, University of Maryland College Park & Michel Wedel, University of Maryland College Park & Rik Peters, Tilburg University
Contextual advertising works by aligning ads with the media environment they appear in. Our research introduces a framework for identifying key ad and context features, using machine learning to predict ad and brand attention. We leverage a Multimodal Large Language Model to analyze high-level topics and an XGBoost model for…
March 11, 2025 | 12:00 – 12:30 pm, ET
MSI Book Series Webinar: Thriving with AI – Deploying the House of AI for Competitive Advantage
Speaker: Anindya Ghose, New York University
This talk will be based on the recent best selling book, THRIVE: Maximizing Well Being in the Age of AI by Ravi Bapna and Anindya Ghose. AI, as a powerful general-purpose technology, is here to stay. With broader agency and understanding (the raison d’etre of the book), individuals can be…
March 18, 2025 | 12:00 pm – 12:30 pm ET
MSI Innovation Series Webinar: To Increase Creativity Be Silly First
Speaker: Martin Schreier, WU Vienna
Creativity is vital in many areas of life, but generating and embracing novel solutions often proves challenging due to cognitive fixation on what is known. This research introduces a novel strategy to enhance creativity by encouraging individuals to start with “silly” ideas. Across several studies, participants who first generated silly ideas,…
April 1, 2025 | 12:00 – 12:30 pm ET
Speaker: Kelly Hewett, University of Tennessee
Generative AI is transforming how marketing research is conducted, offering new ways to enhance efficiency, streamline workflows, and uncover deeper insights. But how can marketers effectively integrate tools like ChatGPT into their own research processes? This webinar provides a practical guide to leveraging large multimodal models (LMMs) at different stages…
April 15, 2025 | 12:00 – 12:30 pm ET
MSI Webinar: Microblogs as Frontlines of Customer Problem Handling
Speaker: Detelina Marinova, University of Missouri & Jagdip Singh, Case Western Reserve University
Our research reveals that common customer service tactics on social media can have unintended effects. Asking for details or offering technical fixes may reduce satisfaction, while moving conversations to private channels helps contain negative feedback. Reassurance (“We’re here to help”) and enthusiasm (“Thanks!”) improve satisfaction, but excessive compassion (“We’re sorry…
April 22, 2025 | 12:00 – 12:30 pm ET
MSI Webinar: Screening Consumer Complaints for Safety Concerns: A Topic Model for Decision
Speaker: Jia Liu, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Consumer complaints often signal product recalls, but firms and regulators struggle to track patterns due to limited resources and unstructured data. To solve this, we developed an AI-driven model (HDPYP) that analyzes complaints in real time, identifying defect trends and predicting recall risks. Applied to the U.S. auto industry, this…
April 24, 2025 | 12:00 pm – 12:45 pm ET
Can Marketing Mix Models Help Companies Mitigate Risk from Tariffs and Similar Economic Shocks?
Speaker: Koen Pauwels, Northeastern University & Scott McDonald, The Advertising Research Foundation & Jason McNellis, Analytic Partners & Ryan Dew, University of Pennsylvania & Henry Innis, Mutinex
Tariffs, inflation, supply chain chaos—external disruptions are increasingly common, but most marketing mix models aren’t equipped to account for them. That leaves marketing leaders exposed when accuracy matters most. In this session, a panel of academic and industry experts will explore how marketing mix models can evolve to: Quantify…
May 6, 2025 | 12:00 pm – 12:30 pm ET
MSI Webinar: Leveraging Livestreaming to Enrich Influencer Marketing
Speaker: Michael Haenlein, ESCP Europe
This talk investigates how livestreaming content can be integrated into influencer marketing to effectively engage Generation Z—a demographic increasingly wary of traditional marketing techniques. Livestreaming is an interactive marketing channel that enhances influencer credibility, audience engagement, and brand authenticity. Through a conceptual model, this talk explores the core dynamics of…
May 13, 2025 | 12:00 pm – 12:30 pm ET
MSI Webinar: Fostering Financial Mindfulness
Speaker: Simon Blanchard, Georgetown University & Emily Garbinsky, Cornell SC Johnson College of Business
Be more mindful about your spending. Buy a financial mindfulness book or journal. Practice daily mindful money mediations. References to financial mindfulness are everywhere. But is it just another fancy buzzword or does being financially mindful actually matter? According to our research, it does! In this session, we will first…
May 20, 2025 | 4:30 pm – 5:00 pm ET
MSI Webinar: How Firms Can Steer Social Media Conversations
Speaker: Harald J. van Heerde, UNSW Sydney
Consumers interact with brands on social media for a variety of reasons—offering advice, sharing compliments, venting frustrations, or filing complaints. This study investigates how firms can use their responses to shape and enhance user sentiment in these conversations. Based on social media activity of four large US banks across 10…
June 3, 2025 | 12:00 pm – 12:30 pm ET
MSI Innovation Series Webinar: Facing the Whiz
Speaker: Aric P. Rindfleisch, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
This talk will tell the story of how Japanese retailers are employing non-humanoid robots in an improvised manner in order to enhance their in-store promotions. It will cover both the origin of this recent initiative, its implementation and its impact on promotional effectiveness. In addition, it will present the results…
June 12, 2025 | 12:00 pm – 12:30 pm ET
MSI Webinar: Marketing in an Age of Uncertainty: Turning Turbulence into Strategic Advantage
Speaker: Keith Smith, Marketing Science Institute & Earl L. Taylor, Marketing Science Institute
In a volatile business climate, uncertainty isn’t an occasional disruption—it’s the new normal. Yet many firms still treat marketing as a cost center rather than a strategic lever for navigating risk, building resilience, and driving long-term value. Drawing from a new MSI Whitepaper that synthesizes insights from leading academic journals,…
June 18, 2025 | 12:00 pm – 12:30 pm ET
MSI Webinar: Beyond the Buzz: What It Really Takes to Make AI Work in Marketing
Speaker: Shardul Wartikar, Kantar
AI excitement may have hit the mainstream, but for many marketing teams, the hard part is just beginning: turning potential into performance. While the launch of ChatGPT kicked off a wave of enthusiasm and experimentation, organizations are now facing the realities of operationalizing AI in meaningful, scalable ways. In this…
June 24, 2025 | 12:00 pm – 12:30 pm ET
MSI Webinar: Optimizing for Search Engines and LLMs
Speaker: David Schweidel, Emory University
With the widespread adoption of generative AI, it is easier than ever for firms to create content. But, how does that content perform? In this research, we compare content posted online before and after the release of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools to examine how online content has changed.…
July 15, 2025 | 12:00 – 12:30 pm ET
MSI Webinar: Market Timing: Identifying the Optimal Moment to Launch a New Technology
Speaker: Thomas Robinson & Ela Veresiu
How can firms best time the launch of new technologies? In this presentation, Thomas Derek Robinson and Ela Veresiu will discuss how product launch timing is a social game of poise and tact when engaging with external stakeholders. Offering sufficient time signals consideration, respect, and mindfulness. Not offering enough time…
August 5, 2025 | 12:00 – 12:30 pm ET
Speaker: Maria Rodas, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champ
This webinar presents a concise overview of recent research examining how innovative new products resonate with bicultural consumers. Our findings indicate that individuals exposed to multiple cultural influences exhibit a heightened need for uniqueness, which in turn drives their favorable evaluations and adoption of products that break conventional molds. Rather…
September 16, 2025 | 12:00 – 12:30 pm ET
Speaker: Martin Reimann, University of Arizona
Discover why revealing your reliance on AI can undermine trust in your brand—and why simple fixes like reframing your disclosure or making it mandatory won’t solve the problem. In this talk, we will explore new research showing how AI disclosure raises doubts about your legitimacy and can overshadow both your brand’s authenticity…
October 7, 2025 | 12:00 – 12:30 pm ET
MSI Webinar: The Confidence Curve: Why Satisfied Customers Leave (And How to Stop Them)
Speaker: Matthew Rocklage, Ph.D., Northeastern University
Marketers believe satisfaction drives loyalty. But what if satisfaction is only part of the story? Using linguistic analysis across 30 years, 100,000 consumers, and 4 million online reviews, this webinar reveals the role of consumer confidence in brand loyalty and product switching. Across diverse domains, we find that as consumers…
October 14, 2025 | 12:00 – 12:30 pm ET
Why consumers who know less about AI are more likely to adopt it and what it means for businesses
Speaker: Stephanie Tully, University of Southern California
Both the capabilities and applications for AI are growing, but who is most interested in adopting AI? Typically, early adopters of technologies are the people who know the most about technology. However, in this talk, we will discuss new findings showing that this is not the case with artificial intelligence. …
December 9, 2025 | 12:00 – 12:30 pm ET
How Generative AI is Transforming the Consumer Insights Industry
Speaker: Neeraj Arora, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Generative AI (GenAI) is fundamentally restructuring the processes by which marketing teams uncover consumer insights. Based on published and ongoing academic research, this webinar will highlight three distinct ways GenAI is disrupting the market research industry. First, we will detail how GenAI improves the consumer insight generation process, leading to significant cost…