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WILKES-BARRE — Christine Walsh and Jordan Lindley talked about bowling and pinball, but it had nothing to do with rolling a ball. Andrew Neidig and Tyler Derby discussed Netflix and absorptive capacity, but the topic wasn’t really movies and certainly didn’t involve paper towels.
Like every other graduate and undergraduate student in the room, they were talking about marketing in the age of social media. Friday was the inaugural Wilkes University Sidhu School Research Day, and 24 teams presented a semester’s worth of work on posters as judges from the Greater Wilkes-Barre Chamber of Commerce and five colleges and universities peppered them with questions and scrutinized their findings.
The judges would winnow the field — already narrowed from a larger contingent of teams that had submitted research work — to a handful that would give PowerPoint presentations, and ultimately pick a winner who, well, got bragging rights.
“We also give them a trophy with candy,” event co-chair Jennifer Edmonds said with a smile.
The research, co-chair Anshu Arora said, is its own reward. “Many of the students learned things they did not know,” the marketing associate professor pointed out.
True enough. Walsh and Lindley, both marketing students, conceded their topic had been assigned, not selected, but ended up creating a whole new “framework” for business making the move from “linear” to “pinball” advertising. Let Walsh explain:
“Traditional advertising is like throwing a bowling ball down the lane and hoping it hits the pins,” she said, citing old school TV ads that beamed out to a wide audience and didn’t give viewers any opportunity to respond. Social media lets businesses interact with customers — in fact, it can force them to. She cited a musician who had a guitar broken on a United Airlines flight. The company ignored the claim he filed, so he wrote a song and performed it on YouTube. It became so popular, United had no choice but to react.
Walsh similarly pointed to a Wendy’s Twitter campaign that offered prizes and drew 33,000 new followers in a month, comparing that to a TV campaign around the same time by Kraft. That resulted in only 3,500 new followers on Twitter.
Their framework is designed to help company “Transition from linear advertising to pinball advertising,” Walsh said, hearing from and reacting to customers through the right social media outlet.
Neidig and Derby looked into how Netflix advertises to a new generation untethered from TV and used to seeing short ads while surfing on their smartphones. “We chose Netflix because they have no brick-and-mortar stores,” Derby said. And because the company recently struck a deal with comic book artist Mark Millar in an effort to compete in a movie world hooked on superheroes. Netflix is also moving into international markets that will require a different approach to ads.
Neidig and Derby focused on “absorptive capacity,” the ability to take in and retain new information. It’s a term often used in business administration to measure how well a firm adapts and uses new information, but it also applies to how well a viewer takes in and remembers brief ads.
All told there were 24 graduate student research projects and 22 from undergrads, trimmed to eight and 15 respectively for Friday’s event. Arora and Edmonds both said the plan is to expand those numbers next time, and to get students beyond the Sidhu School of Business to participate.
