2016 Gary L. Lilien ISMS-MSI Practice Prize Competition
Managing Advertising Campaigns for New Product Launches in the Automobile Industry: An Application at Mercedes-Benz
Prof. Fischer was a finalist in the 2016 Gary L. Lilien ISMS-MSI Practice Prize Competition with his work on "Managing advertising campaigns for new product launches in the automobile industry: An application at Mercedes-Benz". The Practice Prize is awarded for outstanding implementation of marketing science concepts and methods. The methods used must be innovative, sound, and appropriate to the problem and organization, and the work should have had a significant, verifiable, and preferably quantitative impact on the performance of the client organization.   

Two factors drive the effectiveness of an integrated advertising campaign: (1) the budget level and its allocation across media and (2) the quality of the campaign and its execution. Analytical approaches that enable management to monitor, predict, and optimize campaigns are rarely available. We offer an innovative approach that is based on survey data and enables management to monitor and manage advertising campaigns for new product launches in near real-time. The tool uses analytical techniques that are descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive. It has been implemented at Mercedes-Benz and was applied to four recent major new product ad campaigns. Mercedes-Benz significantly improved its campaign management over time and identified a savings potential of up to EUR 2 million by campaign.