News Room

It happens all the time: a brand’s celebrity spokesperson finds him/herself at the center of a controversy, which unwittingly generates negative publicity for the endorsing brand. While currently one of marketers’ preferred avenues for driving brand awareness and boosting sales, celebrity endorsement remains a practice area also wrought with challenges, chief among them being the liabilities they present when celebrities behave poorly, and what disastrous effects these crises can have on a company’s reputation and stock returns. Now, new research in the INFORMS journal Management Science sheds some light on what economic effects a company’s reaction to these unforeseen events might have.

The NYPD has developed new technology called Patternizr, an algorithmic machine-learning software that sifts through police data to find patterns and connect similar crimes. Developed by the New York Police Department, Patternizr is the first tool of its kind in the nation. It's been in use by NYPD since December 2016, but its existence was first disclosed by the department this month.

What started as a peculiar crime quickly turned more sinister when a syringe-wielding man caught trying to steal power drills from a Home Depot in the Bronx attacked an employee with the hypodermic needle. The NYPD quickly realized the suspect, who got away from the scene, had likely done this before. In another incident, a man caught shoplifting a drill had also waved around a hypodermic needle to threaten an employee at a Home Depot in Manhattan. The pattern was detected not by an officer combing through records, but by an analyst utilizing computer software, Patternizr, developed by the NYPD to better fight crime.

Researchers from Northwestern University and Facebook published new research in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science that sheds light on whether common approaches for online advertising measurement are as reliable and accurate as the "gold standard" of large-scale, randomized experiments.