Short three-line advertisements reveal lots of online marketing learning

The Google Online Marketing Challenge has attracted over 30,000 students from 700 universities globally since 2008, with researchers gathering data through closed and openended questions on benefits of the Challenge. This paper adopts a different data gathering approach by asking students to write three-line advertisements in the Google AdWords format to convey benefits of the Challenge so as to attract more students, academics, and clients to participate in future Google Challenge. While the 60 advertisements written by 19 respondents glamorised the Google Challenge, central themes that emerged from the data were work-ready students with real marketing-business skills and a challenged mindset. The process of writing short three-line advertisements to express core learning has implications for theory and practice.