On Wednesday, Google and WPP, a marketing and advertising firm, announced the award of the first round of funding in a planned series of grants to the academic world. The grants, which will total $4.6 million dollars over three years, will be used to fund a variety of projects in areas such as economics, consumer behavior, and statistical analysis, but they all have one thing in common: a focus on online advertising. Grant recipients get to pursue their studies using internal data provided by both Google and WPP, but it's not clear whether the use of proprietary data is compatible with the companies' desire to see the results published in academic journals.

The awards fall under the umbrella of Google Research. Applications were due at the end of last year, and reviewed by three people with academic backgrounds: Glen Urban, the former dean of MIT's Sloan School of Management, Hal Varian of Berkeley, who also acts as Google's Chief Economist, and John Quelch, who's at Harvard Business School while also acting as a director at WPP. There is certainly no obvious reason to think that this panel would be anything other than academically rigorous when evaluating the grants. Their own schools, along with places like NYU and the USC are represented among the recipients, suggesting that the grants attracted applications from professors at a diverse range of top business schools.

What is somewhat amusing about the grants is that this appears to be very much a case of "what Google wants, Google gets." On the page that announces the program, the company lists a variety of "topics of interest" that applicants could consider, describing them as "examples of issues where research would be useful." Some of the applicants seem to have been successful by deciding that, if something is useful to Google, it's probably a good idea.

So, for example, one topic of interest was "Is online media more effective for long tail products rather than main stream brands?" A trio of professors at MIT and the University of Toronto will now be funded to examine the question "Does internet advertising help established brands or niche ('long tail') brands more?" Google was also interested in the allocation of advertising dollars between online and offline outlets, asking, "What are the appropriate metrics for comparing and contrasting online and offline media performance?" A collaboration between Harvard and USC researchers will help them find out, through a study labeled "Optimal Allocation of Offline and Online Media Budget." At this rate, Google will only need a few more rounds of funding to have all of its areas of interest covered.

The grants themselves are in the $50,000-70,000 range, so these are unlikely to make or break a career. What may be a more significant lure is the chance to work with large datasets from various marketing studies, largely provided by WPP. These include brand-tracking data and information on the use of consumer goods, and one monster aggregate that includes information from 6.2 million people, encompassing surveys that span the better part of a decade. These datasets will undoubtedly provide the researchers access to information that would otherwise be very difficult or expensive to obtain.

Bu the researchers might no be so anxious to use the data for the purposes that Google and WPP would like to see. The grant announcement plainly states that Google and WPP expect that researchers will treat work funded by this award in the same way that they treat any other academic work: "award recipients will be invited to participate in a meeting highlighting work in this area and will be encouraged to make their results available online and in professional publications."

Unfortunately, the announcement also makes it clear that the datasets are proprietary. We contacted WPP and asked for a clarification about what, precisely, the researchers will be able to do if they use this data for a publication; a spokesman replied, "The research will be public. The data will not."

In the world of academic research, this is a serious problem. Ethics dictate that other researchers should be able to replicate and extend any published studies, and many journals, as a condition of publication, demand that researchers make any materials used in the course of the studies available to anyone who asks for it. These researchers may face a limited range of options when it comes to publishing work that uses these datasets, and nobody will apparently be able to verify their work.

It's probably possible to perform some of this research without the proprietary data, and $70,000 can buy several years worth of grad students in many locations. Still, it's hard to shake the sense that these grants won't be all that they could be.