FLAME University is proud to say that its team captained by Neha Mubeen, and consisting of Saumya Sampath, Aishwarya Ravishankar, Nikitha DV, Danish Khan and Diksha Chauhan, were declared the Asia & Pacific/Middle East & Africa Winner of the Global Online Marketing Academic Challenge (GOMAC) 2018. This continues a winning streak for teams from FLAME which dates back to 2015, when it began participating in the Google Online Marketing Challenge, GOMAC’s precursor.
GOMAC 2018 was a worldwide competition, in which under-graduate or graduate student teams engaged with a client to create, run, optimize and report on digital marketing campaigns.
FLAME's team, under the guidance of Professor Sajith Narayanan, worked with Hyderabad-based Skywater Clothing, to advertise the brand’s men's T-shirt line, increase its brand awareness and deliver it website clicks and impressions. The team surpassed practically all its targets, across the two platforms of Facebook and Adwords (Search, Display and Video.) Its carefully strategized pre-campaign and highly informative post-campaign reports, along with recommendations and learnings, saw it emerge as a Regional Winner of a competition that began with 165 teams world-wide.
That isn't to say it was an easy ride. "There were countless highs and lows throughout the entire experience", says Neha Mubeen, the team captain, "but since we know we made a good team, we were there to support each other and push through all the obstacles. We had just one aim in mind - get the brand to all the right audiences, and we had done considerable research to determine which websites to advertise on and what the demographic characteristics were."
The challenges were of all kinds. Saumya Sampath, team member, pointed out that digital platforms are exceptionally prone to disruption, ways of doing things change "every second' and therefore one is always a student of the area. In live marketing campaigns, there is no hiding from mistakes, every mistake is seen by lakhs of people, and has to be addressed on the fly. Past success is also no guarantor of the future; because problems are unique and unpredictable. This was a key realization the team came to, even in the early stages of the competition.
In fact, their focus became not so much winning the competition, as helping their client. This involved getting out of their comfort zone, in interesting ways. For instance, a team with only one male member, Danish Khan, had to work on a menswear line, and quickly understand the particularities of how men buy clothes, use the online space and so on.
The team's campaign was part of the coursework in the Digital Campaign Planning course, taught by Professor Sajith Narayanan, Program Lead, Digital Marketing Area at FLAME University. Professor Narayanan's mentorship has been the common link between FLAME's winning teams at GOMC and GOMAC, since 2015. Both Neha and Saumya aver that but for the faith he reposed in them, and the inputs he provided, winning this competition would have been absolutely impossible. Meanwhile, Professor Narayanan denies having any particular 'magic formula.'
"Our students are very good and motivated. I just push them to stick to deadlines and be rigorous, and also boost their ambition and belief. We have a lot of people coming in from the industry, to the University, and when students see that the way they work is also how agencies are working in the real world, it gives them confidence."
"We were behaving", says Saumya, "as if we were actually dealing with a client- which we were. But even in the classroom setting, the output was expected to be of industry standard."
The Global Winner of GOMAC 2018 is to be announced shortly. Meanwhile, FLAME celebrates the hard work and success of its team: Regional Winners in Asia & Pacific/Middle East & Africa.