2026 MSI Webinar: Presentations, Recordings, and Summaries
January 6, 2026 | 12:00 – 12:30 pm ET
LOLA: LLM-Assisted Online Learning Algorithm for Content Experiments
Speaker: Hema Yoganarasimhan, University of Washington
Modern media firms require automated and efficient methods to identify content that is most engaging and appealing to users. Leveraging a large-scale data set from Upworthy (a news publisher), which includes 17,681 headline A/B tests, we first investigate the ability of three pure–large language model (LLM) approaches to identify the…
January 27, 2026 | 12:00 – 12:30 pm ET
Designing Better AI Chatbots: A Rapid Prototyping Playbook for Marketers
Speaker: Aaron Garvey, University of Tennessee
As generative AI chatbots scale across customer service and marketing, teams must make frequent design decisions about tone, escalation, and behavior, often under tight timelines and with limited ability to test changes safely in live environments. This session introduces a rapid prototyping approach that helps organizations evaluate and improve customer-facing chatbots before…
February 3, 2026 | 12:00 – 12:30 pm ET
Can AI Stand in for Your Consumers? What Marketers Need to Know Before Using LLMs for Research
Speaker: Dokyun Lee, Boston University
As large language models (LLMs) become faster and cheaper, many marketing and insights teams are testing them as stand-ins for real consumers, promising quicker insights at lower cost. But do these “synthetic consumers” actually behave like humans? In this webinar, researchers evaluate leading LLMs using a well-established decision task and find a critical disconnect…
February 24, 2026 | 11:00 – 11:30 am ET
Frightful or Fantastic? When Customers and Employees Accept Service Robots
Speaker: Jenny van Doorn, University of Groningen
Labor shortages are accelerating interest in social robots across service industries, from healthcare to hospitality. But success depends less on the technology itself and more on whether customers and employees accept robots as part of the service team. This webinar draws on new research to explain when robots are welcomed…
March 12, 2026 | 12:00 – 01:00 pm ET
Speaker: Shawn Hushman, Chris Barton, and Keith Smith
Join MSI and Adobe for a special information session launching a new joint research initiative on one of marketing’s most persistent and important questions: How does brand marketing drive financial performance? Despite decades of research, many firms still struggle to draw clear, causal connections between brand investment, brand equity,…
April 7, 2026 | 12:30 – 01:00 pm ET
Agentic AI for Frontline Decision-Making: When Should Customer Conversations Stop?
Speaker: Eva Ascarza, Harvard University
Frontline employees constantly face a difficult judgment call: whether to continue a customer conversation or move on. Persist too long and valuable time is lost; disengage too early and promising opportunities may slip away. In this webinar, we introduce a new agentic AI approach to real-time decision-making in customer…
April 14, 2026 | 12:00 – 12:30 pm ET
Navigating Brand Preference Polarization in a Politically Charged Marketplace
Speaker: Oded Netzer, Columbia University
In today’s deeply polarized environment, consumers are no longer separating politics from purchasing. Research shows that 80% of consumers perceive brands as political…
April 28, 2026 | 12:00 – 12:30 pm ET
How Social Recommendations Shape Online Contributions
Speaker: Jia Liu, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Ziwei Cong, Georgetown University
Recommendation algorithms increasingly shape how users discover content online. Many platforms now rely on social filtering, or prioritizing content from people in a user’s network, to drive engagement and satisfaction. But how does this design choice affect the creation of new content? In this webinar, we examine a large…
May 5, 2026 | 12:00 – 12:30 pm ET
Meta Ad Testing Demystified: Divergent Delivery and What It Means for Your Results
Speaker: Brett R. Gordon, Northwestern University, Robert Moakler, Meta, Gordon Burtch, University of Minnesota and Poppy Zhang, Meta
Meta’s Lift and A/B tests are widely used to evaluate campaign performance, but they answer fundamentally different questions. Lift tests estimate true incrementality using a no-ad control, while A/B tests compare campaign variants without a control group. A key challenge in A/B testing is “divergent delivery,” where Meta’s algorithms…
May 19, 2026 | 12:00 – 12:30 pm ET
Assessing Marketing AI: What Practitioners Need to Know
Speaker: Raymond Burke, Indiana University and Max Matthe, Indiana University
Generative AI is quickly changing how marketing teams work and how they think. This webinar highlights new research showing that leading large language models can reliably access core marketing knowledge across areas like segmentation, consumer behavior, pricing, branding, and strategy. Analyzing more than 30,000 textbook-based questions, research finds that today’s AI performs at a high…
June 9, 2026 | 12:00 – 12:30 pm ET
Measuring What Matters: Experimentation and Incrementality in Digital Advertising
Speaker: Jason Choi, University of Maryland
How much do your ads really drive results? Measuring true incrementality, the causal impact of ads on conversions, remains one of the toughest challenges in digital marketing. While experiments are a reliable way to establish causal impact, they can come with costs and tradeoffs. In this webinar, we explore…
June 16, 2026 | 12:00 – 12:30 pm ET
Optimizing Ad Content Strategy: When to Repeat and When to Rotate
Speaker: Kirthi Kalyanam, Santa Clara University
Content repetition is a foundational principle in advertising, yet marketers frequently face the decision of whether to reinforce a single message or rotate multiple creative variations. In this webinar, we present causal evidence from a large-scale field experiment examining when repetition strengthens performance and when content variation delivers greater…