Google and WPP Award Research Grants

Google and WPP have announced the recipients of the second round of grants for their jointly funded research award program, including researchers at academic institutions in the US, Israel and the UK.

Last year, the firms agreed to dedicate up to $4.6m over three years to fund the Google and WPP Marketing Research Awards Program. Its goal is to help those in academia collaborate with the marketing community and the firms' client partners on research relating to topics such as online and offline media interaction, relevance and effectiveness measurement.

This second series of grants will be used to fund projects to research the right mix between online and off-line advertising; measuring the impact of off-line media events on online sales; consumer responses to mobile location-based advertising; and the prediction of purchase conversion from keyword search.

The program is overseen by Professor John Quelch, Senior Associate Dean of Harvard Business School and WPP Non-Executive Director; Google's Chief Economist Dr Hal Varian; and Professor Glen Urban, the former Dean of the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

For this second round of grants, the team has selected 11 research proposals, with funding support up to $80,000 each. An event to highlight the new projects is being planned for November.

Web site: http://research.google.com/university/marketingresearchawards.