BYU Scores First Place in Adobe Competition

PROVO, Utah – Jan 03, 2013 – PROVO, Utah — Dec 14, 2012 — A team of MBA students from Brigham Young University won first place and $15,000 by creating improvements for a website in the 2012 Adobe Digital Analytics Competition.

Each year Adobe hosts the event where graduate students analyze a company’s website, present their findings to Adobe judges, and angle to win part of the $27,750 in prize money. The teams worked to develop the website of this year’s client, Comcast, by crafting improvements based on user experience and website design.

“Our team stuck to the key performance indicators,” says Reid Grawe, event adviser for BYU and director of information systems career management. “We are proud of how well our students performed against the competition.”

This year, 160 teams from 12 universities all around the country entered the competition. Teams were given access to statistics from the live website and had three weeks to analyze. Plans were narrowed down by judges from Adobe and Comcast who looked for successful recommendations for business improvement.

The top six teams included University of California, Berkley; New York University; University of Missouri; University of Texas at Austin; and two teams from BYU. The finalists gathered at the new Adobe building in Lehi, Utah, to present their case.

“Initially, the participation of the big schools gave me anxiety,” Ferguson says. “However, I realized it was our opportunity to show that BYU students can compete with the best in the country.”

The winning team was made of up second-year MBA students Jared Ferguson, from Provo; Tyler Ruby, from Murrieta, Calif.; and Ryan Terry, from Phoenix.

“Waiting for the results was nerve-wracking,” Ruby says. “But when we won, we were beyond excited. Winning made all those long nights preparing worth it.”

The Marriott School is located at Brigham Young University, the largest privately owned, church-sponsored university in the United States. The school has nationally recognized programs in accounting, business management, public management, information systems, and entrepreneurship. The school’s mission is to prepare men and women of faith, character and professional ability for positions of leadership throughout the world. Approximately 3,000 students are enrolled in the Marriott School’s graduate and undergraduate programs.