Abstract
At the October 2008 Direct Marketing Educational Foundation Summit in Las Vegas, NV, representatives from Google and academia reported on their involvement with the inaugural Google Online Marketing Challenge. The panel members were Lizzy Van Alstine from Google, Jamie Murphy from the University of Western Australia, and Marilyn Lavin from the University of Wisconsin—Whitewater; Jim Oliver from Google offered the Keynote Address. The panellists and keynote speaker considered the growing importance of online advertising in general and of search advertising in particular. They described the 2008 Challenge competition and the opportunity it offers students to gain first hand knowledge of search advertising by running a three-week campaign for the small/mid-size business of their choice. They also discussed the unique methods used to evaluate the online advertising campaigns submitted by the 1620 teams across 47 countries that participated in the Challenge. The following is a summary of the presentations