David Schweidel
Professor of Marketing & Goizueta Chair in Business Technology | Emory University, Goizueta Business School
Atlanta, GA, UNITED STATES
Marketing analytics expert focused on the opportunities at the intersection of marketing and technology
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Biography
David A. Schweidel is Professor of Marketing at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. Schweidel received his B.A. in mathematics, M.A. in statistics, and Ph.D. in marketing from the University of Pennsylvania. He was previously on the faculty of the Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business.
Schweidel is an expert in the areas of customer relationship management and social media analytics. His research focuses on the development and application of statistical models to understand customer behavior and inform managerial decisions. His research has appeared in leading business journals including Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science and Management Science. His research has garnered numerous awards, including the Gaumnitz Junior Faculty Research Award from the Wisconsin School of Business and the Marketing Science Institute’s Buzzell Award. He has been recognized as a leading scholar by the Marketing Science Institute’s Young Scholar and Scholar programs, and by Poets and Quant’s “Top 40 Under 40.” Based on his research, he has consulted for companies including EBay, HP Labs and General Motors.
Schweidel is the author of Social Media Intelligence (Cambridge University Press) in which he and his co-author discuss how organizations can leverage social media data to inform their marketing strategies. He is also the author of Profiting from the Data Economy (Pearson FT Press), in which he details the value of businesses tapping into consumer data for both individuals and companies.
Education (3)
The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania: Ph.D., Marketing 2006
The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania: M.Sc., Statistics 2004
University of Pennsylvania: B.A., Mathematics, Economics and Actuarial Mathematics 2001
Areas of Expertise (5)
Marketing Technology
AI
Social Media
Political Marketing
Customer Analytics
Publications (9)
Frontiers: Supporting Content Marketing with Natural Language Generation
Marketing Science2022 Advances in natural language generation (NLG) have facilitated technologies such as digital voice assistants and chatbots. In this research, we demonstrate how NLG can support content marketing by using it to draft content for the landing page of a website in search engine optimization (SEO). Traditional SEO projects rely on hand-crafted content that is both time consuming and costly to produce...
The role of slant and message consistency in political advertising effectiveness: evidence from the 2016 presidential election
Quantitative Marketing and Economics2022 We explore the relationship between the content of political advertising on television and ad effectiveness. Specifically, we investigate how slant – the extremeness of the message –...
How consumer digital signals are reshaping the customer journey
Journal of the Academy of Marketing ScienceDavid A. Schweidel, Yakov Bart, J. Jeffrey Inman, Andrew T. Stephen, Barak Libai, Michelle Andrews, Ana Babić Rosario, Inyoung Chae, Zoey Chen, Daniella Kupor, Chiara Longoni & Felipe Thomaz
2022-02-19
Marketers are adopting increasingly sophisticated ways to engage with customers throughout their journeys. We extend prior perspectives on the customer journey by introducing the role of digital signals that consumers emit throughout their activities. We argue that the ability to detect and act on consumer digital signals is a source of competitive advantage for firms. Technology enables firms to collect, interpret, and act on these signals to better manage the customer journey. While some consumers’ desire for privacy can restrict the opportunities technology provides marketers, other consumers’ desire for personalization can encourage the use of technology to inform marketing efforts. We posit that this difference in consumers’ willingness to emit observable signals may hinge on the strength of their relationship with the firm. We next discuss factors that may shift consumer preferences and consequently affect the technology-enabled opportunities available to firms. We conclude with a research agenda that focuses on consumers, firms, and regulators.
Measuring the Impact of Product Placement with Brand-Related Social Media Conversations and Website Traffic
Marketing Science2019
Incorporating direct marketing activity into latent attrition models
Marketing Science2013 When defection is unobserved, latent attrition models provide useful insights about customer behavior and accurate forecasts of customer value. Yet extant models ignore direct marketing efforts. Response models incorporate the effects of direct marketing, but ...
Online product opinions: Incidence, evaluation, and evolution
Marketing Science2012 Whereas recent research has demonstrated the impact of online product ratings and reviews on product sales, we still have a limited understanding of the individual's decision to contribute these opinions. In this research, we empirically model the individual's decision ...
Portfolio dynamics for customers of a multiservice provider
Management Science2011 Multiservice providers, such as telecommunication and financial service companies, can benefit from understanding how customers' service portfolios evolve over the course of their relationships. This can provide guidance for managerial issues such as customer ...
Understanding service retention within and across cohorts using limited information
Journal of Marketing2008 Service churn and retention rates remain central as constructs in marketing activities, such as valuation of service subscribers and resource allocation. Although extant approaches have been proposed to relate service churn to external factors, such as ...
A bivariate timing model of customer acquisition and retention
Marketing Science2008 Two widely recognized components, central to the calculation of customer value, are acquisition and retention propensities. However, while extant research has incorporated such components into different types of models, limited work has investigated the kinds of ...
Research Spotlight
In the News (27)
Stuck on holiday gifts? What happened when I used AI to help with Christmas shopping
USA Today online
2023-12-01
I admit it. I have never been great at coming up with gift ideas. I do not have that gift, so to speak, of knowing exactly what someone would like without asking or I worry that they’ll want to return what I ultimately pick. Occasionally, I have hit a home run picking up on an idea for the perfect gift
Why Spirit Halloween memes may be the brand’s best friend
Fast Company online
2023-10-06
The digitally altered memes have become a tradition that not-so-subtly promotes the chain of Halloween pop-up shops.
Actors on strike call for limits on artificial intelligence
Yahoo News online
2023-07-18
Your favorite shows and movies are on hold as actors and writers from New York to L.A. to here in Atlanta, are on strike.
Generative AI Has an Intellectual Property Problem
Harvard Business Review online
2023-04-07
Generative AI, which uses data lakes and question snippets to recover patterns and relationships, is becoming more prevalent in creative industries. However, the legal implications of using generative AI are still unclear, particularly in relation to copyright infringement, ownership of AI-generated works, and unlicensed content in training data. Courts are currently trying to establish how intellectual property laws should be applied to generative AI, and several cases have already been filed. To protect themselves from these risks, companies that use generative AI need to ensure that they are in compliance with the law and take steps to mitigate potential risks, such as ensuring they use training data free from unlicensed content and developing ways to show provenance of generated content.
Politicians and Fashion Designers Increasingly Team Up to Benefit Both Sides
Women's Wear Daily print
2022-10-05
Such alliances inevitably have some overlap with their respective audiences, but more often than not there is the opportunity to attract new people for both sides. David Schweidel, a marketing professor at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, said, “It goes both ways. The politician who is partnering with the designer already has their core following. But this is another way to reach a broader audience that they might not have that direct access to.”
Negative rhetoric ramps up ahead of midterm elections
News Nation online
2022-10-21
Emory University Marketing Professor David Schweidel has researched the effectiveness of negative political advertising and says the trend of negative ads and language goes back at least a decade. The negativity, he said, just works, and it reflects a divided country. “If I scare you, if I come out and say, ‘if you don’t do this, this is where we’re heading, it’s going to be a really bad place’ — If I can trigger that fear in you, that’s more likely to get you to act,” Schweidel said.
The Big Question: Could Peloton Sue Over Its ‘And Just Like That’ Appearance?
The New York Times online
2021-12-11
"Think of product placement as an alternative form of advertising," David Schweidel, a professor of marketing at Emory University Goizueta Business School, in Atlanta, says. In recent years, companies have been seeking out product-placement agreements more than ever, he says. The increased use of streaming platforms means viewers are seeing fewer commercials, driving companies to make greater use of product-placement deals to promote themselves.
Brands Are Invading Your Favorite Streaming Shows And Movies, Whether You Realize It Or Not
Forbes online
2021-07-25
“If I’m starting to cobble together my viewing experience as a series of streaming services, I potentially don’t get exposed to traditional television advertising anymore,” Emory University marketing professor David Schweidel told Bloomberg recently. “So product placement becomes the way of cutting down the cost associated with production when you don’t have advertising to support you.”
LeBron James’s ‘Space Jam’ Spurs Stampede of 200 Product Tie-Ins
Bloomberg online
2021-07-16
Whether all these deals pay off for Warner Bros. or its partners remains to be seen. Movie tie-ins can provide big benefits to sponsors, if not the studios, according to David A. Schweidel, a marketing professor at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. The studio doesn’t reveal the terms of its arrangements. "I wouldn’t say that you can expect to draw new viewers to the movies with these partnerships,” Schweidel said in an email. “But, for the brands, these partnerships can be successful tools at attracting the attention of moviegoers.”
Oprah and CNN: AT&T is merging media business with Discovery
ABC News online
2021-05-17
David Schweidel, a business professor at Emory University, questioned whether consumers will be better off with the deal. “If I do decide to cut the cord and I need three to five services to get what I had before, that bill could easily approach what I was paying for cable before,” Schweidel said. “This may end up hurting consumers.”
Emory Professor Says Warner Media Spin Off May Not Be Good for Cord Cutters
iHeartRadio online
2021-05-16
Featuring David Schweidel
Sam Adams, Budweiser Join Krispy Kreme in Branded Vaccine Promo Trend
Morning Brew online
2021-04-12
If red, white, and blue-blooded beer brands feel comfortable putting out vaccine PSAs...why don’t more brands go all-in?
Would the Krispy Kreme Vaccine Card Promo Work for Your Brand?
Morning Brew online
2021-03-24
If much of your customer base has political views against vaccination, a vaccine card promo could hurt brand trust more than help it.
Why do negative political ads work?
WXIA online
2020-12-02
Some viewers complain, but experts say negative ads drive voters to the polls.
Runoff Elections in Georgia Expected to Spur Unprecedented Ad Spend Blitz
AdWeek online
2020-11-09
Two Senate seats are up for grabs, with control of Congress at stake
How Privacy Regulations Will Push Brands to Target Smaller, More Dedicated Groups of Consumers
AdWeek online
2019-08-20
The landscape is shifting quickly with regards to consumer data privacy. GDPR led to fines being levied against British Airways and Marriott for data breaches. Google has also been hit with penalties under the new regulations. With a maximum penalty of 4% of a company’s global revenue, this could result in multi-billion-dollar penalties for large tech companies like Google and Facebook.
What Marketers Can Learn From Consumers’ Social Media and TV Habits
AdWeek print
2019-05-20
Social media and television viewing make strange bedfellows.
To Fix Facebook, Start With Separating the Community and Data Aspects
AdWeek online
2019-05-15
This isn’t the first time the platform made headlines, and it certainly won’t be the last
Futurity
Futurity online
2019-04-05
Marketers have feared that social media distracts viewers from commercials and minimizes their impact. But this research found the opposite. “Social shows” are more beneficial to advertisers because commercials that air in those programs generate more online shopping on the advertisers’ websites.
Factual, or Warm and Fuzzy? Why Choosing the Right Words Matters
Knowledge@Wharton online
2019-01-29
People use words to communicate what they think, feel and believe. But for social psychologists, words can do far more than convey one’s thoughts and emotions.
Republican attacks take aim at non-white congressional candidates
The Guardian online
2018-10-11
Negative campaign advertisements are as familiar in US elections as door-knocking and yard signs. But as the 2018 midterm election campaign pulls into its homestretch, Republican attacks in two congressional races happening 3,000 miles apart have triggered alarm bells for targeting non-white candidates in an apparent effort to highlight their “otherness”.
How Social Media Platforms Foster Hatred, Violence
GPB radio
2018-11-02
We spoke with David Schweidel, professor of marketing at Emory University, about the problem with social media echo chambers. In response to demands to shut down Gab after the Pittsburgh shooting, the site tweeted, "Words are not bullets and Gab isn't going anywhere." Schweidel discussed where the responsibility should lie when preventing violent hate speech online.
Does negative political advertising actually work?
phys.org online
2018-06-04
The study "A Border Strategy Analysis of Ad Source and Message Tone in Senatorial Campaigns," which will be published in the June edition of INFORMS journal Marketing Science, is co-authored by Yanwen Wang of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver; Michael Lewis of Emory University in Atlanta; and David A. Schweidel of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
Encouraging TV Binge Watching May Backfire On Advertisers
NPR online
2015-12-16
VEDANTAM: Well, Wendy Moe at the University of Maryland and David Schweidel at Emory University, Steve, they analyzed television binge watchers. It's actually difficult to measure whether when you're watching television you're paying attention to the ads or not. So what Moe and Schweidel did was they analyzed television binge watching on the Hulu platform. People are watching television on a computer. There are ads that show up. And they attract about 10,000 viewers - 100,000 viewing sessions. And the researchers analyzed how willing people were to engage with the ads. Here's Moe...
Statistical model uses transaction attributes to better target marketing resources
PhysOrg online
2015-08-10
Braun collaborated on development of the customer valuation model with David A. Schweidel, associate professor of marketing in the Goizueta Business School at Emory University, and Eli Stein, a statistics undergraduate at Harvard University when the study was conducted and the paper written. Braun said the research is the first to identify and quantify how differences in the interactions of customers with a firm affect the long-term value of the customer relationships...
Spring semester brings new programs, events across the university
Emory News Center online
2015-02-02
New books: David Schweidel, an associate professor of marketing at Goizueta Business School, looks at the present in identifying trends of the future. For example, presently, marketers have troves of data on customers. The goal for the future? Identify more ways to utilize the data in decision making (“Profiting from the Data Economy”)...
Synergy Or Interference? How Product Placement In TV Shows Affects The Commercial-Break Audience
Forbes online
2014-09-08
In research just published in Marketing Science, my colleagues David Schweidel of Emory University and Natasha Foutz of the University of Virginia and I began to explore whether such synergies exist. Specifically we examined how product placement might affect the audience for subsequent ads in a number of cases. These included a perfect match, which is when the same product features in both the placement and the ad, e.g. the judges on American Idol drink Coke and then a Coke advertisement is shown in a subsequent commercial break...
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