ICORIA 2026: Best Student Paper Award for Steffen Prior and Tobias Langner
Foto: Julian Felix Kopka
Award for the Chair of Marketing at the University of Wuppertal: Steffen Prior and Tobias Langner received the Best Student Paper Award at the 2026 International Conference on Research in Advertising (ICORIA) in Barcelona for their paper, “Practice Makes Perfect? A Comparison of Prompt- and Fine-Tuning of Digital Participants to Simulate Human Responses in Advertising Research.”
With this achievement, the research team continues its successful work on AI-supported digital participants in advertising research. A precursor series of studies from the project had already received the Best Student Paper Award at ICORIA 2025 in Rotterdam. This year’s paper directly incorporates the feedback received on last year’s presentation and extends the previous approach by systematically comparing two methods. In addition to prompt-tuning, which is flexible and comparatively easy to implement, the researchers conducted resource-intensive fine-tuning to specifically adapt a Large Language Model (LLM) for simulating human participants in advertising research.
The results show that even sophisticated and theoretically promising methods are not readily able to overcome biases inherent in LLMs when simulating human responses. The study therefore highlights the need for a nuanced assessment of the use of digital participants in advertising research. At present, human participants in quantitative studies should not be replaced without a deeper understanding of the characteristics, limitations, and actual capabilities of LLMs. The jury was particularly impressed by the study’s innovative methodological design and the high relevance of the topic for the future of advertising effectiveness research.
We would also like to express our sincere gratitude to the Center for Graduate Studies (ZGS) at the University of Wuppertal for funding the conference trip. The support provided by the ZGS makes an important contribution to enabling early-career researchers to increase the international visibility of their research and to engage in academic exchange at renowned scientific conferences.
ICORIA is one of the world’s leading conferences in the field of advertising research and brings together researchers from around the globe each year to discuss current findings and developments in advertising and communication research. This year, 250 research papers from 33 countries were submitted to ICORIA.
https://www.europeanadvertisingacademy.org/awards-grants/#icoria-best-paper-award
