Students finish second at Marketing Analytics Hackathon 2025
3 July 2025
A team of postgraduate students from Cardiff Business School placed second in the 2025 Marketing Analytics Hackathon.
The competition, held on 11 June 2025 at Queen Mary University of London, saw two teams of students from Cardiff Business School’s MBA programme competing against students from three other universities across the UK: Queen Mary University of London, Oxford Brookes University and the University of Exeter.
This was the inaugural Marketing Analytics Hackathon, sponsored by the Marketing Analytics and AI Special Interest Group of the Academy of Marketing and the charity organisation Cerebra.
The event provided a collaborative, fast-paced, and innovative environment, challenging students to apply data-driven solutions to contemporary marketing analytics issues.
Participants worked on a real-world case involving charity telemarketing strategy. They were asked to step into a role of Marketing Analytics Managers at Cerebra—a Carmarthen-based charity that supports children with brain conditions and their families—and analyse a telemarketing dataset consisting of donor information, campaign data, donor payment and agent performance. Based on their analysis, teams were tasked with providing data-driven recommendations to optimise telemarketing strategies and agent performance.
Following their analysis, the students created and delivered a 10-minute presentation outlining their recommendations to a panel of judges.
Dr Simon Jang, who attended the Hackathon with the students, commented: “I am very pleased that a Cardiff team successfully applied the business analytics techniques I taught to a real-world business case and secured second place in the Hackathon. Their achievement reflects excellent team collaboration, creative and advanced data analysis, and insightful recommendations.”
Soham Adurkar, a member of the team that placed second in the Hackathon, said: “Coming second at the Marketing Analytics Hackathon was incredibly rewarding. It was intense, collaborative, and deeply fulfilling to apply data skills to a real-world social impact challenge. I'm proud of how our team combined analytics, creativity, and strategy to deliver a solution we truly believed in.”