The third edition of the Google Online Marketing Challenge
In 2010 Google held the third edition of Google Online Marketing Challenge, which is a global university competition that gives students the opportunity to expose their skills to online marketing. The rules are that every team must receive a sum of 200 $ to work with a local company and to create for it an online marketing campaign. The dead-line is in three weeks since the start of the competition, time for the participants to create a strategy before submitting a campaign report to an international jury, formed by numerous eminent professors.
As the organizers say, this year participated 3034 teams from 60 countries, which is a huge success taking into account that the participation increased since last edition with 39 percent. In this way, the Google Online Marketing Challenge is considered one of the largest university competitions in the world.
The 3rd edition’s global winners are Lauren Williams, Ganesh Chaudhari, Jeeana Atmarow, Allison Miller, Mohammed Assiri and Hui Min Chua, all from the University of Western Australia. The team built its strategy on a kids’ novel called “The adventures of Charlie and Moon”. It is easy to see that their online marketing campaign had a huge success by simply visiting the novel’s website, which increased with an enormous 800 percent after the three weeks of campaign. The prize for the winning team is a visit to the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, and each member of the team will get a laptop, as a reward for their performance in the competition.
The competition also has three regional winners. For America, the winners come from Carnegie Mellon University in the U.S., for Europe, Middle East and Africa, the winning team was from the Warsaw School of Economics in Poland and for the Asia Pacific region the winning team is from the Edith Cowan University in Perth, Australia.
By working with real money, real businesses, real campaigns and results, the participants have the important opportunity to apply what they have already studied in their universities. Taking into account the fact that the competitors are more and more numerous each year, just participating can be an important step in students’ careers, because they had the chance to learn about the online advertising and in the same time they helped with their strategies the small businesses to become more present on the online market. If you think you can win the next year’s edition of Google Online Marketing Challenge, you will be happy to find out that they will start the sign-ups in this fall. Good luck!11
