2019 William F. O’Dell Award

Seshadri Tirunillai and Gerard J. Tellis have been selected as the recipients of the annual William F. O’Dell Award for their article “Mining Marketing Meaning from Online Chatter: Strategic Brand Analysis of Big Data Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation,” which appeared in the August 2014 issue (Vol. 51, No. 4) of the Journal of Marketing Research.

The award honors the Journal of Marketing Research article published five years previously that has made the most significant long-term contribution to marketing theory, methodology, and/or practice. The committee overseeing the selection process comprised Sachin Gupta (chair), Russ Winer and Mary Frances Luce. ​In recognizing the winning paper, the committee made the following comment:

Five years ago the “Mining Marketing Meaning” paper was a pioneer in the development and use of machine learning techniques to extract meaning from user-generated content in the form of unstructured textual data. The paper opened the door to a new and influential stream of research in marketing that multiple other researchers have built upon in the years since its publication. Today such data and techniques are ubiquitous and widely used by marketing scholars and practitioners, due in part to the paper’s rigorous and comprehensive application to an important marketing problem central to marketing practice.

In addition to the winning paper, the three other excellent finalists for the award were:

• “Social Networks, Personalized Advertising, and Privacy Controls” | Catherine E. Tucker
• “Listening in on Social Media: A Joint Model of Sentiment and Venue Format Choice” | David A. Schweidel, Wendy W. Moe
• “Driving Online and Offline Sales: The Cross-Channel Effects of Traditional, Online Display, and Paid Search Advertising” | Isaac M. Dinner, Harald J. Van Heerde, Scott A. Neslin

Learn more about the O’Dell Award, previous recipients, and how to support the award via the AMA Foundation.