On January 24th, 2020, at the iHeartMedia offices on the Dallas tollway, the five finalist teams of this year’s ITOM case competition presented their solutions to a challenge set by iHeartMedia. The case challenge revolved around clustering a subset of iHeartMedia’s 850 live broadcast radio stations in order to optimize the spend on primary research. Primary research entails third parties compiling panels that reflect a given music radio station’s listener demographics, playing a portion of the song for them, and then asking them about their opinions on the song. The resulting popularity (POP) scores inform the programming decisions that program directors make. The case required the analysis of a considerable amount of rich data.
The competition finals were the culmination of months of preparation, particularly by the iHeartMedia Data Engineering and Analytics group, which prepared the case and the data. For the 66 Cox Masters’ students who signed up to participate in teams of three, the competition kicked off a week earlier, on Friday, January 17. The students had just over four days to submit their solutions. By lunchtime on Wednesday, ITOM faculty had evaluated the submissions and selected the five finalist teams:
Gravity (Rony Huang, Zilin Wang, Janet Yuan)
Super Mario Bros (Ahtsham Ahmad, Mario Gonzalez, Nikai Zhang)
Model Behavior (Katelynn Cox, Adam Salem, Finn Zeng)
My Heart Will Go On (Yen Jung Chen, Zhencong Tang, Chi Zhang)
TQL (Chaoyong Dai, Sean Sun, Xinyi Wang)
On the day of the finals, the judging panel comprised of three ITOM faculty (Profs Bhaskaran, McDonough and Schultze) and three iHeartMedia managers (Eric Riggs, Product Owner, Music Lab; Christina Garcia, Project Manager, Music Lab; and Antonio Carbajal, Head of Analytics, Data, & Decision Sciences), as well as Prof. Basu (tie breaker) and Steve Mills (iHeartMedia’s VP of IT), deliberated over lunch. The competition winners were then announced:
First place, with prize money of $6000, was awarded to the team of MBA students, Super Mario Bros. 1st Place Winners: Ahtsham Ahmad,
Mario Gonzalez,
Nikai Zhang
The two runner up teams, both comprised of students in the Masters of Business Analytics program, were My Heart Will Go On and TQL. Each runner up team was awarded $3000 in prize money.
2nd Place team 1: Chen Yen Jung,
Zhencong Tang,
Chi Zhang 2nd place team 2: Chaoyong Dai,
Yuefeng Sun,
Xinyi Wang
Congratulations to the winning teams and a heartfelt ‘thank you’ to all the students from the various Cox Masters’ program who participated in the ITOM case competition this year!
ITOM faculty (Profs Amit Basu, Sree Bhaskaran, Tim McDonough and Ulrike Schultze), iHeartMedia managers (Eric Riggs, Product Owner, Music Lab; Christina Garcia, Project Manager, Music Lab; and Antonio Carbajal, Head of Analytics, Data, & Decision Science, Steve Mills iHeartMedia’s VP of IT 5 finalist teams: Gravity (Rony Huang, Zilin Wang, Janet Yuan) Super Mario Bros (Ahtsham Ahmad, Mario Gonzalez, Nikai Zhang) Model Behavior (Katelynn Cox, Adam Salem, Finn Zeng) My Heart Will Go On (Yen Jung Chen, Zhencong Tang, Chi Zhang) TQL (Chaoyong Dai, Sean Sun, Xinyi Wang)
