Agenda:

Customer Management & Artificial Intelligence
Speaker: Dr. Eva Ascarza, Harvard Business School

The session will offer an overview on how companies can use AI to improve their returns on marketing efforts.

Design and Evaluation of Personalized Targeting Policies
Speaker: Dr. Hema Yoganarasimhan, University of Washington

Firms often run A/B tests to evaluate the effectiveness of different marketing strategies (e.g., pricing, promotions, advertising, website design). However, simply assigning all users to one action (e.g., one ad creative or promotion) is often suboptimal. In this talk, we will go beyond standard A/B tests and learn how to design and evaluate personalized targeting based on recently developed machine learning methods. We will cover a general framework that is broadly applicable to a wide range of industries and problems.

Word of Mouth & Influencer Marketing
Speaker: Dr. Mitchell Lovett, University of Rochester

This session will introduce frameworks around word-of-mouth/social media (WOM) determinants and effects, and their relationship to brands. Both the benefits and limitations of WOM will be discussed. Influencer and second-screening will be explored through some early research results. Measurement of word-of-mouth both via surveys and social media analysis, as well as its effects will be covered in the process.