NEWS
Prashant Rajaram, a doctoral student at the Ross School of Business, recently received the best paper award at the 2019 Haring Symposium at Indiana University for his research regarding advertising in the ever-changing on-demand streaming industry.
When was the last time you quit streaming your favorite show because you got tired of watching all the ads?
Prashant’s paper — “Finding the Sweet Spot: Ad Scheduling on Streaming Media” — received the best paper award at the 2019 Haring Symposium at Indiana University. It is based on his research into advertising on free, on-demand streaming platforms like YouTube, Dailymotion, and IMDb TV. He worked alongside Ross marketing professors Puneet Manchanda and Eric Schwartz to develop an optimal advertising schedule for these platforms that maximizes ad exposure without compromising how much content a viewer consumes. The paper uses machine-learning tools to predict the “Bingeability” and "Ad tolerance" of a viewer based on their past behavior, and then uses these predictions to develop the ad schedule. You might see his research put into use on some major streaming platforms in the future.