A professor rewriting a digital marketing module asked me this recently, and it is the reasonable version of a question the industry keeps asking in a louder voice: is SEO dead? If AI assistants now answer the questions that used to return ten blue links, should the SEO weeks give way to AI weeks? I have been doing SEO since 2010, which means I have heard that it is dying for my entire working life. The short answer: yes, SEO is still worth teaching, but the 2015 version is n

Most marketing professors choose a simulation by default. The textbook publisher bundles one. A colleague recommends what they used last year. The department keeps whatever the previous instructor set up. None of that is a criticism. Evaluating simulation platforms is not what anyone got into academia to do, and most of us have better calls on our time than vendor demos in August. But the cost of defaulting in 2026 is higher than it was in 2022, because what students need to

We sat down with Milt to speak about the complexities of helping students find solid footing in a rapidly changing marketing industry.

We sat down with Dr. Vuković to discuss the five-week course she developed using Novela’s Search Marketing (Google Ads) Simulation and Social Media Advertising (Meta Ads) Simulation

On Friday, Google published official guidance on how to optimise for the generative AI features inside Google Search. The most-quoted sentence is also the most useful: "Optimising for generative AI search is optimising for the search experience, and thus still SEO." The argument that follows is that AEO (answer engine optimisation) and GEO (generative engine optimisation) are not new disciplines, that several proposed "AI optimisation hacks" are nonsense, and that the core pr

John Ploumitsakos is a Teaching Assistant Professor of Marketing at Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado Boulder, whose 20 years of marketing experience, including senior leadership positions at Google and Twitter, give him unique insights into the modern marketing landscape. In his senior-level Advertising and Promotion Management course, for example, Ploumitsakos breaks the semester into three segments: planning a budget, creative strategy, and brand stra

Cases or simulations. This is the choice in front of every business school marketing professor in 2026, and the literature pretending to settle it is mostly written by people who have not stood in front of an undergraduate cohort in twenty years.

Alicja Grzadziel is a PhD candidate and a research associate at the Institute for Interactive Marketing & Social Media (IMSM) at WU Vienna. Her research focuses on both brand communication, particularly how misleading claims affect brand perception, and ways user-generated content, such as dupe videos, can impact brands’ sales performance. Studying such current topics in digital marketing makes Grzadziel uniquely qualified to teach the next generation of digital marketers, w

Novela, the marketing simulation platform used at over 40 universities including Columbia, Northwestern Kellogg, Imperial College London, King's College London, Oxford, and McGill, today announced Novela AI Search — its sixth simulation and the first interactive training environment designed to teach marketing decisions in an AI-powered search landscape.

As all educators grapple with incorporating ethical AI use into the classroom, marketing professors are faced with an even more complex question: How to best prepare college students for a workplace in which they will likely use AI daily?

In just a few short years, AI has completely revolutionized the ways most of us engage with the digital world. AI now shapes the ways we search and chat online, as well as the content we see. For students, AI is transforming the learning experience. Recent studies from the Higher Education Policy Institute show that in 2024, use of generative AI tools, like ChatGPT, jumped 53%, with students reporting that they used AI to summarize ideas, explain content, and, yes, generate w