Google Taught Australian Students to Use AdWords

There's an interesting post on the official Google blog today about the results of Google's program of teaching students all around the world to use Google AdWords (they call it online marketing but still). They claim that the program was launched to give the students skills that they could take directly into the workforce from university.

The program worked with an international panel of professors that brought their students into competition. Every participating team of students was given Google AdWords vouchers of $200 that they could use to help grow a local business of their choice. So now Google has announced the winners - a team of students from the University of Western Australia who partnered with an indoor rock-climbing school and reportedly did a great job of promoting the business efficiently with AdWords. There are almost no details on how exactly the results were evaluated based on the students' reports so I'd really love to see a comment from the The Hangout (hopefully the students also taught their partner to use Google Alerts as well to track their name online as a part of their online marketing campaign) to get more information on how exactly the program helped them increase the brand visibility or customers' base.

Google Online Marketing Challenge (this is the name of the program) involved over 1,600 student teams from 47 countries with all of them partnering with local businesses to show them how efficient advertising can be if done right. The winners will now visit Mountain View for a tour of Googleplex and as an addition every team member will also receive a MacBook Pro "to help them in their ongoing studies". Definitely not a bad prize for artificially using AdWords, right? The success of the program resulted in decision to make this regular and submissions from students and professors are accepted for the next year.

But my personal concern is that I can hardly understand how use of AdWords equals an online marketing campaign. Is this what the future employers of the students will really be interested to find in the candidates? Something tells me that no: they will probably prefer to hire a specialist with good knowledge of all aspects of internet marketing, especially those that are free to use. Watching the market proves that the most efficient measures are usually free and involve active community and brand awareness building as people are generally tempted to ask other consumers for their opinions (or search for them) and trust them while seeing a paid link does not result in any trust. So spending money on online advertising looks more like the last step when everything else (social media, community building, etc.) failed to bring the traffic and buyers the businesses need. Maybe LinkedIn should launch a similar program for students to learn the tricks of efficient business networking as well?

Image credit: Google Online Marketing Challenge website