The AMA Foundation (AMAF) is proud to honor Eric Schwartz, Associate Professor of Marketing at University of Michigan Ross School of Business, as the recipient of the 2025 Robert J. Lavidge Global Marketing Research Award!
The Robert J. Lavidge Global Marketing Research Award recognizes a marketing practitioner or educator who has devised and successfully implemented a research/insight procedure within the last five years that has practical implications for use by others. Professor Schwartz’s groundbreaking research created the first-ever data-driven approach to optimize finding and removing infrastructure-produced hazards customer-by-customer, specifically applied to drinking water pipes tainted with toxic lead. Based in machine learning and sequential data collection methods, the approach formed the basis of a company, BlueConduit, which since has defined a whole new product category (predictive modeling to identify lead pipes), spawned competitors in the market, served 50+ water utility companies spanning 400+ cities and towns, and affected specific policies in federal EPA and over 40 state regulatory agencies.
About the Winner
Professor Eric Schwartz’s expertise focuses on predicting customer behavior, understanding its drivers, and examining how firms actively manage their customer relationships through interactive marketing. His research in customer analytics stretches managerial applications, including online display advertising, email marketing, video consumption, and word-of-mouth. The quantitative methods he uses are primarily machine learning, Bayesian statistics, and field experiments. His current projects aim to optimize firms’ A/B testing and adaptive marketing experiments using a multi-armed bandit framework. As marketers expand their ability to run tests of outbound marketing activity (e.g., sending emails/direct mail, serving display ads, customizing websites), this work guides marketers to be continuously “earning while learning.” While interacting with students and managers, Professor Schwartz works to illustrate how today’s marketers bridge the gap between technical skills and data-driven decision making. His Robert J. Lavidge Marketing Research Award-winning work and research have made impactful contributions to finding lead pipes in Flint, Michigan, and to state and federal policy around using predictive modeling in facing uncertainty. To expand that work’s impact, he co-founded BlueConduit, an infrastructure analytics company using AI and operating in more than 400 cities and towns across North America. He joined University of Michigan Ross School of Business in 2013, and earned his Ph.D. in Marketing from the Wharton School and a B.A. in Mathematics and Hispanic Studies, all from the University of Pennsylvania.
Professor Schwartz will be honored at the AMA Foundation Awards Luncheon on August 23, 2025, during the 2025 AMA Summer Academic Conference in Chicago, IL, August 22-24.
