Hooking NYU Students On Mobile Advertising

Convincing students—not to mention adults with full-time jobs—to sign up for summer courses is never an easy task. As an experiment, New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies is trying out a free mobile app designed to drive enrollment in an online summer mobile marketing course.

Created through sponsorships with Sprint and DudaMobile, the Mobile Marketing Overview app features video lectures, class exercises, and quizzes. “We wanted to give students an opportunity to taste the content and get excited about the subject matter,” explained Renee Harris, assistant dean at the NYU-SCPS division of programs in business.

The university is promoting the Overview app through email and website placements. Once students complete the lessons, they will receive a reminder email encouraging them to enroll in the full mobile marketing course. The course is aimed at students and small to medium-sized business owners who want to apply mobile advertising to their business. The app does not contain any ads, but that could be a possibility, according to Harris.

“We’re looking at this app as a test run to see what improvements we can make and what can be included in future roll-outs,” Harris said. Harris declined to say how many people had downloaded the app, but noted that the app will be a useful source of behavioral data as the university tracks usage rates like click-through-rates and the amount of time spent on each section to gain insight into students’ interests. The app is available on iOS and Android devices.

In terms of measuring the app’s success, besides the conversion rate, the university will be looking at “which segments of the market have we reached that we haven’t reached yet,” Harris commented. “We’re excited about expanding our audience and giving more people an opportunity to give the class a try and hopefully decide that they want to learn more about mobile marketing.”

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