Where digital platforms and AI-driven marketing strategy intersect

For Fei Long, there is no real “off’ switch when it comes to marketing.

A marketing professor at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School, she sees it when she shops online, scrolls social media and watches ads. She sees it when she’s developing a research question, preparing for class and watching her students experiment with new digital tools.

“It’s all melted together,” Long says. “It’s everything that you think is regular in your normal life, and you think deeper about what’s happening behind.”

That curiosity — about what happens behind the everyday interactions between consumers, companies and technology — has shaped Long’s career as a teacher and marketing scholar at UNC Kenan-Flagler.

She works and teaches at the intersection of digital platforms and AI-driven marketing strategy.

Long began her career as quantitative researcher in the finance industry. While she appreciated the field, she realized she wanted to study something she could experience more directly.

“Finance is great, but I wanted to get more down-to-earth,” Long says. “I like something I can actually see and touch.”

She served as a research scientist position at Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto, where she contributed to the development of a unified big-data project for pricing, customer segmentation, new product introduction and competitive analysis.

She went on to her PhD at Columbia Business School. With the discovery of marketing as a field, she recognized an opportunity to combine her quantitative, engineering-oriented background and her interest in human behavior.

“Marketing is the human interaction part,” Long says. And yet, the rise of digital marketing was making the discipline increasingly quantitative, providing the opportunity to leverage the technical skills she developed earlier in her career.

That intersection between human exchange and digital markets became Long’s research home.

Her early work focused on digital marketing and platforms such as Google and Amazon. More recently, she has begun studying AI-enabled markets, a natural extension of her work on digital platforms, and the ways technology changes the relationships among consumers, firms and intermediaries.

One of her projects examines a question at the center of an emerging battle over artificial intelligence: How should AI platforms compensate publishers whose content helps train and power their systems?

The question has implications that extend well beyond individual companies. If publishers have little incentive to continue producing high-quality content because AI platforms can use that content without adequate compensation, Long says, the consequences could ultimately affect the AI platforms themselves.

She is also exploring what happens to the advertising and monetization models that have powered search engines such as Google if consumers increasingly turn to generative AI platforms for information instead.

The questions are some of the newest issues within the marketing world. And that is precisely what Long finds exciting.

Her research and teaching are closely connected, with each informing the other. In her research she explores cutting-edge problems from a theoretical perspective; in her classroom she translates those ideas into concepts that students can use.

And the flow goes in the other direction as well.

“Sometimes I learn from my students: how they look at a problem, what are interesting problems and then return to my research,” Long says.

That exchange is particularly important in a field that changes almost as quickly as the technology behind it.

When Long first taught digital marketing at UNC Kenan-Flagler, roughly two-thirds of one course focused on search marketing. Then retail media emerged, prompting another redesign. As social media evolved from Facebook to Instagram to TikTok, the course evolved with it. Now, generative AI is transforming the material once again.

Long embraces that pace in the classroom by making her courses experiential.

In one exercise, students use Meta Ads Manager to develop targeting strategies for a hypothetical startup. Given a limited audience size, they must make decisions about demographics, location and interests — experiencing firsthand how digital advertising differs from traditional mass-market advertising.

More recently, students have used generative AI to create advertising copy, images and videos for the same hypothetical business.

The goal is not simply to teach students how to use the latest tool. It is to help them understand the forces shaping the digital marketplace — and to become thoughtful participants in it.

“Digital marketing is one of the few fields that is almost different every year,” Long says.

Long also practices what she teaches. To keep pace with the industry, she follows research and industry publications, listens to podcasts, talks with people working in the field and experiments with digital advertising herself.

“It’s hard,” she says of keeping up. “Digital marketing is one of the few fields that is almost different every year.”

That challenge, however, is also an advantage.

Students are sophisticated consumers, Long says. They quickly recognize when material feels dated. Their reactions provide a kind of real-time feedback loop, pushing her to continually update what and how she teaches — and sometimes helping her identify questions worth pursuing in her research.

For Long, that connection between scholarship and teaching is ultimately about impact.

“Research is about creating knowledge,” she says. “But teaching is about disseminating that knowledge.”

She also sees teaching as a form of contribution: taking what she has learned and leveraging it to help other people.  And that philosophy is part of what drew her to UNC Kenan-Flagler.

When Long interviewed at several business schools after completing her PhD, UNC Kenan-Flagler made an immediate impression. She was drawn to the School’s sense of community, its support for research and the broader intellectual ecosystem of the Research Triangle.

And there was something more personal, too.

“The people are so nice,” she says. It was one of the things that made Chapel Hill feel like the right place to build her career and be with her family.

That sense of community remains central to Long’s experience at UNC Kenan-Flagler. Her work now addresses one of the defining questions facing business: How should companies and consumers navigate markets increasingly shaped by AI?

The technology will continue to change, and the platforms will keep evolving. The questions Long teaches today likely will look very different a few years from now. And for her, that is part of the appeal.

When she gets the opportunity to step away from the demands of work and family and simply think about the problems she studies, she sometimes has a surprisingly simple realization.

“I love my job,” Long says.

For a scholar whose work is devoted to understanding how the world works beneath the surface, perhaps that is the most fitting discovery of all.