Faculty Profile for Dr. Kristen Sussman

Biography Section

Biography and Education

Kristen L. Sussman, Ph.D. (University of Texas at Austin), is an advertising scholar and computational social scientist with expertise in social media and online advertising. She leverages her advanced knowledge of native and third-party social media platforms to connect, monitor, and assess consumer behavior.

Recently, Dr. Sussman’s scholarly curiosity has expanded to exploring AI's impact and implications in online environments and consumer technologies through AI-mediated communication. Given the novelty of AI, this area presents pressing research questions she aims to address through collaborative, interdisciplinary work throughout her career.

Her research employs techniques such as natural language processing, network analysis, and machine learning to uncover patterns and insights from complex online data. Engagement—a key variable in online advertising effectiveness—reflects attention, interest, desire, and action, capturing an individual’s psychological and emotional involvement with a message and serving as a powerful indicator of impact.

Dr. Sussman’s academic and professional journey began with a deep interest in persuasive messaging and advertising effectiveness. During her doctoral studies, this focus evolved into computational advertising, where she applies computational social science methods to address advertising challenges by analyzing large datasets of digital traces, including messaging metadata and consumer behavior.

Professional Background
Dr. Sussman draws heavily on her entrepreneurial background and practical experience. From 2011 to 2019, she owned and operated an award-winning agency, Social Distillery. The company's mission was to deliver long-term, powerful, and measurable results while creating marketing campaigns that people love. Dr. Sussman and her team were part of the first to scale social business strategies for notable clients that included Facebook (now Meta), Dairy Queen, Chuy's Restaurants, Micro Focus (now HPE), Spredfast (now Khoros), Farm Credit Bank of Texas, Jive Software, KVUE-TV, among many, many others. In 2019, the agency was acquired allowing her to focus fully on her doctoral studies.

Teaching Interests

Dr. Sussman's teaching interests are in advertising strategy, business, new media, media technology, engagement, data science, marketing analytics, and computational methods.

Dr. Sussman's prior teaching experience includes academic lecturing appointments at The University of Texas at Austin and St. Edward's Bill Munday School of Business. She's also supported corporate communications teams, leading the design and implementation of curriculum in social business for enterprise tech (i.e., adoption, measurement, and community management) and continuing education in online advertising.

Research Interests

Her research focuses on the impact of online communications and, more recently, artificial intelligence (AI). Dr. Sussman aims to uncover important relationships between advancements in generative AI technology and media effects, consumer behavior, and social network engagement.

Using a combination of language analysis and behavioral trace data, Dr. Sussman applies social science methods in the domain of computational advertising to investigate message processing and explore the effects of different social and psychological framing techniques. Her expertise has contributed to research on discrete emotion and media use, advertising effectiveness, technology adoption, health communication, and science communication.

In 2023, Dr. Sussman joined as Co-PI on a City of Austin grant where she is contributing her expertise to test the role of AI in advertising and provide support for the co-design of the research with a focus given to the creation, execution, and reporting of research findings using behavioral and trace data collected through social media.

Sussman has been published in the Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, International Journal of Advertising, Journal of Interactive Advertising, Journal of Current Issues & Research in Advertising, Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing, and Journal of Marketing Development and Competitiveness. She regularly presents her work at academic conferences and is a member of the American Academy of Advertising (AAA) and the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC).