The CMO Summit@MIT

• Devin Cook – Associate Director, MIT IDE
• Sinan Aral – Director, MIT IDE

• Dean Eckles – Social Networks & Digital Experimentation Research Group Lead, MIT IDE

• Paramveer Dhillon – Assistant Professor, University of Michigan and Digital Fellow, MIT IDE

“Modeling Dynamic User Interests in News Consumption”

Enjoy a break for lunch.

• Marcel Marcondes – Global CMO, AB InBev and Former CMO, Anheuser-Busch
• Sinan Aral – Director, MIT IDE and Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management

Brewing Innovation: Anticipating Consumer Demand at AB InBev

• Madhav Kumar – PhD Candidate, MIT Sloan School of Management

“Scalable Bundling: Combining Machine Learning and Field Experiments”

Bundling, the practice of jointly selling two or more products at a discount, is a widely used strategy in industry and a well-examined concept in academia. Scholars have largely focused on theoretical studies in the context of monopolistic firms and assumed product relationships (e.g., complementarity in usage). There is, however, little empirical guidance on how to actually create bundles, especially at the scale of thousands of products. We use a machine-learning-driven approach for designing bundles in a large-scale, cross-category retail setting. We leverage historical purchases and consideration sets determined from clickstream data to generate dense representations (embeddings) of products. We put minimal structure on these embeddings and develop heuristics for complementarity and substitutability among products. Subsequently, we use the heuristics to create multiple bundles for each of 4,500 focal products and test their performance using a field experiment with a large retailer. We use the experimental data to optimize the bundle design policy with offline policy learning. Our optimized policy is robust across product categories, generalizes well to the retailer’s entire assortment, and provides an expected improvement of 35% (∼$5 per 100 visits) in revenue from bundles over a baseline policy using product co-purchase rates.

• Jeremy Yang – Assistant Professor, Harvard Business School

“TikTok Influencers”

In this session, Jeremy Yang will detail his joint research which developed an algorithm to predict the effect of influencer video advertising on product sales. Yang and colleagues proposed the concept of motion-score, or m-score, a summary statistic that captures the extent to which a product is advertised in the most engaging parts of a video. They locate product placement with an object detection algorithm, and estimate pixel-level engagement as a saliency map by fine-tuning a deep 3D convolutional neural network on video-level engagement data. M-score is then defined as the pixel-level, engagement-weighted advertising intensity of a video. They construct and evaluate the algorithm with around 40,000 influencer video ads on TikTok, the largest short video platform of the world. They leverage variation in video posting time to identify the causal effect of video ads on product sales. Videos of higher m-score indeed lift more sales. This effect is sizable, robust, and more pronounced among impulsive, hedonic, or inexpensive products. They trace the mechanism to influencers’ incentives to promote themselves rather than the product. Jeremy will discuss how various stakeholders in entertainment commerce can use m-score in a scalable way to optimize content, align incentives, and improve efficiency.

Enjoy a 15-minute break

• Stephan Pretorius – Chief Technology Officer, WPP
• Sinan Aral – Director, MIT IDE

“Tech-Powered Creative: AI Marketing Automation and the Future in Creative Advertising”

• Sinan Aral – Director, MIT IDE

“Effectiveness of Social Advertising”

Most of the empirical evidence on social advertising effectiveness focuses on a single product at a time. As a result, little is known about how the effectiveness of social advertising varies across product categories or product characteristics. We therefore collaborated with a large online social network to conduct a randomized field experiment measuring social ad effectiveness across 71 products in 25 categories among more than 37 million users. We found some product categories, like clothing, cars, and food, exhibited significantly stronger social advertising effectiveness than other categories, like financial services, electrical appliances, and mobile games. More generally, we found that status goods, which rely on status-driven consumption, displayed strong social advertising effectiveness. Meanwhile, social ads for experience goods, which rely on informational social influence, did not perform any better or worse than social ads for their theoretical counterparts, search goods. Social advertising effectiveness also significantly varied across the relative characteristics of ad viewers and their friends shown in ads. Understanding the heterogeneous effects of social advertising across products can help marketers differentiate their social advertising strategies and lead researchers to more nuanced theories of social influence in product evaluation.

• Renée Richardson Gosline – Human/AI Interface, Research Group Lead, MIT IDE

“AI & Cognitive Bias”

Human decisions are increasingly mediated by technology, as we navigate input from “artificially-intelligent” recommendation systems and outsource cognitive load to algorithms. Enabled by this digital transformation, firms have extolled the virtues of “frictionless” experiences – embracing automaticity to remove impediments to purchase while “nudging” customers along the journey. But friction isn’t all bad, but rather critical to combatting AI bias. We’ll explore the difference between “bad” and “good” friction in CX and how to embrace “good friction” in deploying AI to minimize harm and become “human first.”

Enjoy a 10-minute break

• Peggy Byrd – CMO, Boston Globe Media
• Tom Brown – Vice President of Consumer Revenue, Boston Globe Media
• Sinan Aral – Director, MIT IDE

“Achieving Tomorrow’s Goals with Today’s Decisions at the Boston Globe”

• Andrea Ward – CMO, VidMob

“The New Element: How Brands Are Using Creative Data to Drive Performance”

•  Join us for a live audience Q&A session with MIT IDE Director and Professor, Sinan Aral

Event concludes at 5pm EST

Sinan Aral a global authority on business analytics; award-winning researcher; entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He is the David Austin Professor of Management, Marketing, IT and Data Science at MIT, Director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE) and a Founding Partner at Manifest Capital. He was the Chief Scientist at SocialAmp, one of the first social commerce analytics companies (until its sale to Merkle in 2012) and at Humin, a social platform that the Wall Street Journal called the first “Social Operating System” (until its sale to Tinder in 2016). He is currently on the Advisory Boards of the Alan Turing Institute, the British National Institute for Data Science in London, the Center for Responsible Media Technology and Innovation in Bergen, Norway and C6 Bank, one of the first all-digital banks of Brazil. Sinan has helped leading Fortune 500 firms, including Facebook, Yahoo!, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, WeChat, Spotify, AirBnB, Microsoft, Walmart, IBM, Intel, Cisco, Oracle, SAP and The New York Times to realize business value from big data analytics, social media and IT investments. His research has won numerous awards including the Microsoft Faculty Fellowship, the PopTech Science Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, a Fulbright Scholarship and the Jamieson Award for Teaching Excellence (MIT Sloan’s highest teaching honor). In 2014, he was named one of the “World’s Top 40 Business School Professors Under 40.” In 2018, he became the youngest ever recipient of the Herbert Simon Award of Rajk László College in Budapest, Hungary. In the same year, his article on the spread of false news online was published on the cover of Science magazine and became the second most influential scientific publication of the year in any discipline. Sinan’s first book, The Hype Machine, which was named a 2020 Best Book on Artificial Intelligence by WIRED, a 2020 Porchlight Best “Big Ideas and New Perspectives” Book Award Winner and among the Best New Technology Books and Best New Economy Books to Read in 2021 by BookAuthority, became an instant classic and a must-read for business leaders at every level of management. A managerial economist and econometrician by training, Sinan’s expertise spans social networks, causal inference, the design and analysis of large-scale digital experiments, machine learning, predictive modeling, natural language processing, AI, big data, marketing, IT, social commerce, ecommerce, behavior change and economic productivity. He earned his PhD at MIT and completed his Master’s degrees at the London School of Economics and at Harvard. You can find Sinan on Twitter @sinanaral and on Instagram @professorsinan.

• Tom Brown – Vice President of Consumer Revenue, Boston Globe Media

Peggy Byrd is the Chief Marketing Officer of Boston Globe Media (BGM) and heads the marketing, audience engagement and customer service functions for Boston Globe Media’s family of brands. She leads her team in developing initiatives to grow the organization’s iconic brand and to celebrate its storied history and commitment to serving the community, combining editorial-driven campaigns that resonate with current readers while also inviting new audiences in. Her unique experience and expertise in leading high-impact, award-winning campaigns drives the innovation of new omnichannel, cross-platform strategies to enhance BGM’s digital experience, subscriber journey, data analytics, thought leadership and new services.

Prior to joining BGM, Peggy led a private practice, Byrdsnest Consulting, providing marketing consulting to media, entertainment and non-profit organizations. She has held leadership roles in multicultural marketing at several marquee media brands, including iHeartMedia and Entertainment, where she stewarded brand partnerships for syndicated audio/digital shows such as The Steve Harvey Morning Show and The Breakfast Club; TV One/One Solution; Condé Nast Bridal Media (CNBM); and ESSENCE Magazine at Time Inc., where she led brand and ad sales marketing and consumer promotions for special events, including its flagship event, the ESSENCE Music Festival.

A graduate of Brown University, Peggy holds a BA in Organizational Behavior and Economics. She also earned an MBA, with a concentration in Marketing, from New York University Leonard N. Stern School of Business.

Devin Cook is Associate Director at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE). Previously, she co-founded and led the IDE’s Inclusive Innovation Challenge, a $1.5 million future of work prize for startups. A Fulbright Scholar, she researched entrepreneurship and economic development among textile artisans in India. She has conducted research with MIT innovation and entrepreneurship faculty, worked at multiple start-ups, mentored over 100 start-up founders, and teaches entrepreneurship at accelerators nationwide. Devin is an Advisory Board member of Humans for AI, a Jurist for the INDEX: Award – the world’s largest design prize, and a Board Member of Coastal Enterprises, Inc.. She earned a BA from Middlebury College and an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management, where she was awarded the Ronald I. Heller Award for her contribution to entrepreneurship education on campus.

Paramveer Dhillon is a Digital Fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, and is an Assistant Assistant Professor of Information, at the University of Michigan School of Information

Paramveer’s research broadly involves making careful empirical measurements (both causal and predictive) from big data and draws on ideas from Computer Science, Statistics, Sociology & Applied Econometrics. Substantively, he is interested in understanding the value drivers in digital & social products and the strategies that firms should adopt in developing them. In one stream of research he is investigating digital paywall strategy for newspapers (in partnership with The New York Times and Boston Globe) and in an another stream of research, he is working on finding efficient targeting strategies in social networks (to maximize the size of viral diffusion cascades).Paramveer holds an A.M. in Statistics and M.S.E & Ph.D. in Computer & Information Science (CIS), all from the University of Pennsylvania. His doctoral dissertation won the Morris & Dorothy Rubinoff Best Dissertation Award. His doctoral dissertation, which was on statistical Machine Learning & Natural Language Processing (NLP), proposed simple linear spectral learning methods that give accuracies comparable to or better than state-of-the-art “deep-learning” algorithms on text data and has been published in top tier journals/conferences.

Dean Eckles is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at MIT Sloan.

His substantive research examines people’s interactions with and through communication technologies, especially how these technologies mediate, amplify, and direct social influence. This work sometimes requires or benefits from new analytical methods, so Eckles also works on applied statistics, design of field experiments, and causal inference.

Prior to joining MIT, he was a scientist at Facebook, where he worked on many product areas and analytical methods, including News Feed, messaging, advertising, tools for randomized experiments, and survey methods. Eckles previously worked in research at Nokia and Yahoo.

Eckles received his BA in philosophy, a BS and MS in cognitive science,  an MS in statistics, and a PhD in communication, all from Stanford University.

Renée Richardson Gosline is a Senior Lecturer in the Management Science group at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the head of the new Human-AI Interaction group at MIT’s Initiative on The Digital Economy. She is an expert on the intersection between behavioral science and technology, and the implications of AI for cognitive bias in human decision-making. In 2020 Dr. Gosline was named a Digital Fellow at Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab. and an honoree on the Thinkers50 Radar List of thinkers who are “putting a dent in the universe.” She has also been named one of the World’s Top 40 Professors under 40 by Poets and Quants. She is a leading thinker on the science of digital brand strategy and CX, and has been published in academic journal and books, and has contributed her expertise to international media outlets PBS, The BBC, The Economist, NPR, Yahoo Finance, Forbes, and Psychology Today.

Dr. Gosline’s research examines how digital structure and technology affect human judgment and performance (as featured in her Tedx talk, “The Outsourced Mind”). Her projects have examined: how cognitive style predicts preference for AI versus human input; the interaction of digital brand status and placebo effects in performance; how consumers determine “real” from “fake” products; the circumstances under which customers perceive value in platforms; and the effects of storytelling in social media on trust and persuasion. She is currently conducting experiments on how the presence of AI affects the judgment of human decisions, and the interplay of human and AI bias, Gosline is also currently writing a book called “The Human Algorithm” (MIT Press), which examines how AI affects our lives, and the benefits and perils of our digitally-mediated judgments.

Dr. Gosline enjoys teaching MBA and Executive Education classes on CX (Customer Experience), Brand strategy, and Experimental Culture. She has also collaborated and consulted with a variety of organizations on CX and Leadership, including Salesforce, IBM, Procter and Gamble, OECD, Johnson & Johnson, Analog Devices Incorporated, TD Ameritrade, and Capgemini. Prior to academia, she was a marketing practitioner at LVMH Moet Hennessy and Leo Burnett.

Dr. Gosline serves on the advisory board of the National Kidney Foundation and the Scientific Affiliate Board of the Behavioral Economics group Ideas42. She received her Undergraduate, Master’s, and Doctoral degrees at Harvard University.

Madhav Kumar is a final year PhD Candidate in management at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Madhav’s work investigates and improves core business strategies such as pricing, targeting, and recommendations in online marketplaces. Methodologically, he fuses machine learning and causal inference tools to evaluate and optimize both personalized and system-wide policies. He especially focus on scalable models, a critical aspect of applied work that is currently untapped in quantitative social science research.

He is supervised by MIT IDE Director and MIT Sloan Professor, Sinan Aral, MIT IDE Research lead and MIT Sloan Professsor, Dean Eckles, and Professor John Hauser.

In his past life, Madhav was a management consultant and a researcher at the Reserve Bank of India. Madhav holds a bachelors (honors) in physics and a masters in economics.

Marcel Marcondes has recently been appointed Global CMO, ABinBev. This move is part of the revised global strategy for ABI, which will focus on leading the category growth and creating a future with more cheers.

For the past 5 years Marcel was the Chief Marketing Officer at Anheuser-Busch, where he led the marketing strategy for a broad portfolio of some of the world’s largest beer brands – Budweiser, Bud Light, Michelob ULTRA, Stella Artois and more. He was responsible for a transformation within the marketing organization where people are at the center of everything they do as a company.

By applying this people-first approach to the business, Marcel has overseen many of the fastest growing brands in the industry by connecting the portfolio with consumer trends and innovation. Since 2018, the company has led innovation volume in the beer category tripling innovation rate and new product net revenue generation, reaching over one billion USD.

Marcel was recently named to Forbes “World’s Most Influential CMOs” list and AdWeek’s Top 50 across marketing, media and technology. Since 2019, Marcel has been recognized on Business Insider’s annual “Top 25 Most Innovative CMO’s In the World” list. In 2017 and 2018, Sports Business Journal recognized Marcel as one of the 50 Most Influential People in Sports Business.

Using creativity to build brands, Anheuser-Busch has won a total of 39 Cannes Lions, 37 Pencils at the One Show and 43 Clios – the most in the company’s history during that span. That approach plus the creation of in-house digital capabilities also led AB to the #1 position in the industry on social media performance.

Marcel currently sits on the Board of Directors for the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and is a member of the Cannes Lions CMO Growth Council. He also sits on Adweek’s Diversity & Inclusion Council and leads Anheuser-Busch’s partnerships with AIMM’s #SeeHer and #SeeAll to promote multicultural marketing. He also serves as a mentor for The Marketing Academy where he works with talented marketers to develop their leadership capabilities.

A 16-year veteran of ABInBev, Marcel has spent his career at the company connecting its beers to people and culture to drive growth. Prior to his U.S. leadership role, Marcel was Vice President of global brands and growth development platforms where he managed international expansion. Before that, Marcel led marketing for Skol, Brahma and Antarctica in Brazil, the three largest brands in that market.

Before joining ABInBev, Marcel spent seven years in brand management at Unilever. Marcel has a master’s degree in business administration from the Business School São Paulo.

Stephan Pretorius has more than 20 years’ experience in marketing and advertising technology and is passionate about helping brands develop the ever-evolving capabilities necessary to deliver groundbreaking customer engagement strategies.

Stephan joined WPP as its first Chief Technology Officer in October 2018 and is responsible for the company’s technology vision and strategy, and for managing its relationship with key technology partners such as Google, Adobe, Salesforce, Microsoft, IBM and Facebook.

From 2016-2018, Stephan acted first as Chief Technology Officer and then UK Group CEO at Wunderman where he integrated the group’s agency and technology offerings to create one of the UK’s largest digital agencies with more than 2,000 specialist staff across commerce, marketing technology, consulting and CRM.

Earlier in his career, Stephan recognized the potential of technology-enabled marketing to radically influence the way brands engage with consumers. In 1999, he founded Acceleration, the leading marketing technology consultancy. Acceleration joined WPP in 2012 and became a division of Wunderman in 2016.

A native of South Africa, Stephan holds a Master’s degree in Media & Telecommunications Law from Columbia Law School.

Andrea Ward is CMO of VidMob. A marketing veteran with over 20 years in growing SaaS businesses and leading high performing global marketing teams, Prior to VidMob, Andrea led Adobe’s global enterprise marketing team after serving as CMO of Magento (acquired by Adobe). Prior to Magento, she served as Global Vice President of Marketing for Oracle Marketing Cloud, where she launched the business and led demand, product and customer marketing, and was a part of the leadership team that helped acquire a number of technology companies to build the company’s Marketing solution.

Jeremy Yang is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Marketing Unit at Harvard Business School. He teaches Marketing in the MBA required curriculum. He develops data products to improve advertising, targeting, and pricing decisions in his research. These algorithms are typically guided by some economic or behavioral principles and implemented with techniques in machine learning and causal inference. He is also broadly interested in the creator economy and web3.

His work has received several recognitions including an INFORMS Annual Meeting Best Paper Award, American Statistical Association Dissertation Proposal Award, and MSI Alden G. Clayton Dissertation Proposal Award. He received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is also affiliated with the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, the Harvard Data Science Initiative, and the Institute for Quantitative Social Science.