14 DAY TRIAL // Teams from 47 countries entered a contest sponsored by Google, but only 4 came out victorious. All of them had as mission the finding of small businesses that had a website but didn't profit from the possibility of advertising their products online. Google gave the contestants AdWords vouchers worth $200 in order to help the establishments have a nice start on the WWW domains.
All the participants were students, led by their professors, and were advised by Google to allocate to the project as many hours of study as possible in order to get the best results. The global winner was the team from the University of Western Australia, which successfully helped an indoor rock-climbing school advertise its business on the Internet. The team won, as the big prize, a trip to Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California, as well as an Apple MacBook Pro for each member.
The regional winners were the teams from the Pennsylvania State University, which augmented the business potential of a local tourism and information site; the Bern University, which helped a local travel agency, and the Australian Graduate School of Management, with a campaign for a small bakery in California. The other teams also got an official recognition of their effort, while the jury included their work in the following categories: finalist, semi-finalist, strong campaign, good campaign, fair campaign, campaign that needs improvements and ineligible campaign. The last category included mostly projects that lasted less than 7 days or more than 25, as the established time span was of 3 weeks.
"The Online Marketing Challenge offers a great opportunity for students to develop their skills and experience in online marketing. Local businesses also benefit as the AdWords campaigns have helped promote their business to a wider community. I feel absolutely thrilled that one of my student teams is the global winner," said Dr. Fang Liu, the adviser of the winning team.