UT Austin Moody College of Communication Organizes Live Super Bowl Ad Rating Panel

AUSTIN, Texas — Jan. 30, 2014 — During this Sunday's Super Bowl, advertising professors from The University of Texas at Austin Moody College of Communication will live tweet critiques of Super Bowl ads.

Professor Neal Burns (@berryboy316), Assistant Professor Angeline Close (@angelineclose), Assistant Professor Carlos Hernandez (@chm_utaustin), Associate Professor Michael Mackert (@mackert), Assistant Professor Kevin Thomas (@kevin_d_thomas), Professor Gary Wilcox (@garybwilcox) and lecturer Steve Wille (@swilleman) will share their thoughts under #SBAdJudge.

They will assess ads on qualities such as the presence of a strong emotional hook, relevance to the brand's position, the likelihood that a viewer would ask friends to view the ad and the likelihood that a viewer would want to see the ad again.

The faculty members will meet virtually through 3D ICC's Immersive Terf platform to watch the Super Bowl. Burns also uses the Terf platform to teach his Advanced Account Planning Seminar at Moody College.

In addition to the faculty panel, students from two advertising courses will tweet their thoughts about Super Bowl-related social media and ads. Students from Wilcox's Social Media course will post under #AdGradBowl, and students from Wille's Sports and Social Media course will post under #ADV378S.

The faculty members all have deep experience in advertising, marketing, traditional media, social media, online media and messaging. 

Burns is a former senior partner and director of research and account planning at Minneapolis-based ad agency Carmichael Lynch. He is founder and director of the master's-level Texas Account Planning program, which is designed to allow students to observe, interpret and integrate consumer insights into the advertising creative process. He also has served as director of Moody College's Center for Brand Research since 2002. 

Close conducts consumer research. Her areas of expertise are event marketing/sponsorship, online consumer behavior and branding. Her research has been featured on CBS and in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, New Scientist, the St. Petersburg Times and the Las Vegas Review-Journal. 

Close is immediate past president of the American Marketing Association's Consumer Behavior Special Interest Group. She also serves in various leadership roles for the Association for Consumer Research, the Society for Marketing Advances and the Academy of Marketing Science.

Hernandez teaches courses on research methods, new media and online advertising. In addition to teaching, he plans to conduct research on advertising with a strong emphasis in modeling new forms of advertising and research methods. 

Mackert’s research focuses on health literacy, with a particular interest in the best ways to design health messages to reach low health-literate populations. Other research interests include telemedicine and the mass media's influence on peoples' health habits. His research has appeared in the Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare, Telemedicine and e-Health, the International Journal of Technology Assessment in Health Care, the Journal of Palliative Care and the Journal of School Health.

Thomas' research focuses on the socio-cultural effects of marketing communication and consumer behavior. His primary research interest pertains to understanding the relationship among marketing communication, consumption practices and notions of self and community. His work has appeared in the Journal of Organizational Change Management and the Journal of Management, Spirituality & Religion. 

Wilcox's research focuses on social media analytic models and advertising's effects on liquor products and brands. His publications include one book, several book chapters, and more than 30 articles that have appeared in the International Journal of Advertising, Journal of Advertising Research and the Journal of Advertising.

Wille's career has focused on client and agency sides of the communications business, with a particular emphasis in the sports and destination marketing industries. At the Moody College of Communication, Wille’s focus is to bridge the gap between academic exploration and real time professional sports communications practices.

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Contacts: Laura Byerley, (512) 471-2182; Angeline Close, (512) 471-8902; Neal Burns, (512) 799-6605.