Jonathan A. Jensen

Jonathan A. Jensen serves as an Associate Professor of Sport Administration at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with a focus on the intersection of data science and sport marketing.

A two-time finalist in the research papers competition at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, Jensen has co-authored three papers honored with the “Paper of the Year in Sport Marketing” award from the American Marketing Association’s (AMA) Sport and Sponsorship-Linked Marketing Special Interest Group (SportSIG) and was named an “Emerging Scholar in Sport Marketing” by the same group.

He authored the “Best Conference Paper” at the European Association for Sport Management (EASM) Conference in 2021 and is a four-time finalist for the “Outstanding Article” award from the Journal of Issues in Intercollegiate Athletics, winning the award in 2019.

Dr. Jensen has been named a North American Society for Sport Management (NASSM) Research Fellow, a distinction that recognizes scholars by honoring their achievements in sport-related scholarship, as well as a Collegiate Sport Research Institute (CSRI) Fellow.

Jensen has authored more than 50 peer-reviewed papers published in leading academic journals, including the Journal of Sport Management, Sport Management Review, and Sport Marketing Quarterly, as well as several highly-rated business and marketing journals, including the Journal of Business Research, Journal of Advertising Research, Business Horizons, Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, Marketing Letters, Journal of Consumer Marketing, Journal of Global Marketing, and Marketing Intelligence & Planning.

His research has been featured in USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, AdWeek, Chicago Tribune, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Portland Business Journal, Columbus Dispatch, The Baltimore Sun, and the WGN Morning News.

Dr. Jensen is a leading voice in the application of predictive analytics to the study of sport marketing, specializing in the use of advanced statistical models such as multilevel and survival models to solve marketing-related problems. His research in this area has been published in the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports and the Journal of Sports Analytics, and presented at the New England Symposium on Statistics in Sports (NESSIS), the Great Lakes Analytics in Sports Conference (GLASC), the 9th International Sport Business Symposium in South Korea, the American Marketing Association (AMA) Winter and Summer Academic Conferences, and the Academy of Marketing Science (AMS) Annual Conference.

He has been awarded a PhD Students Research Grant from the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) Olympic Studies Centre, the IBM Junior Faculty Development Award, the Jimmy and Judy Cox Asia Initiative Faculty Award from the Carolina Asia Center, the UNC Global Partnership Award, and a Conference Presentation Award from the UNC Center for Global Initiatives.

Dr. Jensen serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Advertising Research, Journal of Consumer Marketing, International Journal of Sports Marketing and Sponsorship, and Journal of Global Sport Management.

Prior to entering academia, Jensen served as an executive for leading sport marketing agencies in global advertising networks Omnicom Group (GMR) and Publicis Groupe (Relay Worldwide), as well as working for teams in the National Football League (NFL) and Major League Baseball (MLB).

Jensen earned a B.A. from the University of Notre Dame, a M.S. from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and a Ph.D. with a Graduate Interdisciplinary Specialization in Quantitative Research Methods (GISQRM) from The Ohio State University. A native of Homewood, Illinois, Jensen and his family reside in Chapel Hill.