IT Milk: entry

I never thought that my summer internship at Pepperjam would prove to be useful for my academic career at Penn State University. But an IST professor just announced an independent study for Penn State to compete in the Google Online Marketing Challenge. The following is the email from Professor Jim Jansen, who is organizing the event:

I am organizing an independent study for the Spring 2008 semester of approximately 4 – 6 undergraduate students to participate in the Google Online Marketing Challenge (http://www.google.com/onlinechallenge/).

By engaging in the independent study, you will gain practical, real world online marketing experience while getting all the excitement of competing with teams of other students from all over the world.

Google will provide us with US$200 of free Google AdWords advertising and we will devise an effective online marketing campaign for a real world organization. Google will then evaluate marketing strategy over a 3-week advertising campaign.

Google will select regional winners to compete in a second round of competition to select the world winner. All participants will receive certificates of participation.

There are (as of Thursday 22 Nov.), 90 schools in 30 countries have already entered 950 groups — about 4750 students. I have already enrolled our team.

If interested or want more information, please contact Dr. Jim Jansen (jjansen@ist.psu.edu)

Best,
Jim

I already have pretty advanced knowledge of Google Adwords so this opportunity will be more of a test of my current skills. But if you have no prior experience, the Google Online Marketing Challenge is a great opportunity to learn more about internet marketing and pay-per-click advertising.

Just as a note, the success of your GOMC team depends as much on the small business that you select to run the campaigns on as your PPC skills. Unless Professor Jansen already has something in mind, I’m guessing that we will have to choose a local business in State College, PA who will be benefiting from our free online advertising. Since this competition will begin next Spring, we will have to consider the seasonal market for maximizing the ROI.