What a Difference 50 Years Makes!

This article is related to:

Truth in Advertising

Anniversaries, such as the Journal of Advertising’s 50th, are a good time to take stock of where things stand and observe changes over time. The history of JA is on record in these very pages, and I will not repeat it here. Rather, my intention in delivering this golden anniversary editorial to you is to celebrate JA’s 50th by briefly looking back at the first issue of JA.

This practice of reflecting back to look forward affords us an opportunity to consider just how far we have come as a journal and as a discipline.

Reflecting Back

In 1972, a single periodical—Volume 1, Issue 1—of JA was published. It was 49 pages in total.

There were 11 articles, including six commentaries, one editorial, one empirical study, and one pilot study. The pilot study was accompanied by one critique and one rejoinder. I invite you to explore the table of contents and articles of that first issue, which can be accessed via the JA website.

You will note that the 11 articles were written mainly by professionals and various academics. Topics in the first issue of JA addressed concerns of advertising as a discipline and current issues of advertising research, theory, and practice.

In the article summaries that follow, you will see those honored authors (and their positions at the time of publication) in order of appearance from that first issue of JA and discover how far we have come as a result.

• Sandage (1972), the father of advertising education and professor emeritus at University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign, talked about social and economic contributions of advertising and the role of strong educational programs in advertising as an important philosophical foundation for effective practice. Sandage’s concerns for advertising were about not the criticisms it attracted but how the public ignored advertising and what could be done about it.

• Advertising practitioners and policymakers Kirkpatrick (1972) (chairman of the Federal Trade Commission), Rockwell (1972) (chairman of the board and chief executive officer of North American Rockwell Corporation), and Tallman (1972) (member of the committee of the New York Bar Association) talked about forms of advertising regulation and the importance of researchers and policymakers working together to protect consumers and invigorate the profession. Over the years, JA continues to be a place for articles on advertising regulation and larger societal concerns.

• Jones (1972), senior vice president and executive creative director for Leo Burnett, discussed a technological innovation—namely, the executive reel—as an event used for top management to review and comment on recent television commercials. Look closer and you will see that it is not just a description of the executive reel but also an acknowledgment of the “song and dance” between consumers and advertisers, and a resolve of questions about how or why some ads may succeed or fail—questions that still hold the interest of advertising scholars today.

• White (1972), lecturer at Northwestern University and teaching fellow at University of Alabama, discussed creativity in advertising and put forward two pivotal steps—incubation and illumination—to achieve advertising creativity. Incubation and illumination describe how a creative person absorbs the problem and then lets “nature” take its course. The article and proposed steps have led to discussions on advertising creativity that have been cited as recently as 2015 among academics and professionals.

• Ginter and Bass (1972), academics at Purdue University and Ohio State University, respectively, presented results of an experiment on the positive impact of advertising exposure and brand usage on attitude change. They found that consumers with stronger brand loyalty were less likely to change their attitude toward a new brand. If you type the words “attitude change” into the search bar on JA’s website, you will see Ginter and Bass’s study is the first result—among a growing list of 1,020 results in JA. Thus, while this was certainly not the first study to examine the positive impact of advertising in the literature, it was JA’s first publication on the topic of attitude change.

• Arndt (1972a), a researcher at the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration, reported results of a pilot study investigating the intrafamily similarity of perceived risk and opinion leadership in nuclear families’ household decision making. Results supported hypotheses on intrafamily similarity regarding risk perception but not opinion leadership. This finding prompted a critique by R. G. Stewart (1972) and subsequent rejoinder by Arndt (1972b), with meaningful discussion on the original conclusion from the standpoint of theory, method, and analysis, and serves as a good reminder of the important role of our journals in the sharing (and contesting) of ideas.

From this summary, you can see that while these articles may be five decades old, the topics and questions explored would be fitting for the journal today. To recap, authors in the first issue of JA explored topics on advertising’s role in the discipline and society; current issues in advertising theory, research, and practice; and how current issues were changing advertising in those days. Each of these topics has appeared in articles published throughout 50 years in JA and as recently as in the current issue, Volume 51, Issue 1. In view of this fact, it seems incredible to think about where JA started and how far JA has come in 50 years.

Looking Forward

Today, five issues of JA are published annually, totaling 680 pages in length. That translates to about 40 articles published each year. JA has been growing in two important areas: an increase in annual impact factor and number of submissions. In 2021, we received 754 manuscripts from submitting authors in 58 countries. To put that into perspective, that means that in 2021 JA had submissions from authors in over one-fourth of the countries in the world. Most of these submissions clustered into three regions: North America, Europe, and Asia. Submissions in 2021 also came from Australia/New Zealand, the Middle East, and South America.

Geographic locales of authors in JA have also expanded since 1972. In JA’s most recent previous issue (Volume 50, Issue 5) and in the current issue (Volume 51, Issue 1), there are authors from Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Hong Kong, Israel, Korea, New Zealand, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the United States.

The large uptick in number of submissions is a very healthy sign for a journal, especially when coupled with a corresponding increase in impact factor. JA’s two most recent two-year impact factors reported by Clarivate Analytics were 6.302 (2019) and 5.522 (2020).

The increased volume of JA submissions is partly due to the expanding size of the advertising field and the ever-increasing diversity of topics in advertising research. Indeed, articles selected for the current issue of JA are a testament to just how much advertising topics have expanded since JA was first published in 1972.

While the foregoing remarks give some idea of where JA started and where JA is now, this editorial would be incomplete were nothing said about JA’s first editor, Dan Stewart. In the first issue of JA, Dan provided an editorial titled “Truth in Advertising.”

In that editorial, Dan stated that identifying and searching for truth is crucial for advertising evaluation. He identified some possible ways to search for such truth, such as advancing advertising education and developing coherent (psychological) theories, verifiable laws, and valid scientific methodology. He emphasized that a search for truth requires efforts from everyone, including researchers and scholars, university administrators, and industry professionals.

In his conclusion, Dan stated:

Ultimately, the search for truth in advertising is an issue that can only be decided by the coherency of our psychological theories and verifiable lives established on their assumptions. However, it is a search that should be shared by everyone connected with advertising in any way. This means that there will naturally arise many conflicting points of view of what constitutes truthful advertising and truthful research. A primary purpose of this journal is to provide a public forum wherein these conflicting points of view can be fairly contested in the market place of ideas. (Stewart 1972, p. 49)

That focus on the search for truth in advertising that Dan wrote about in the Journal of Advertising all those years ago is still at the core of what we are doing today. Our goal for the next 50 years, as it was for the first 50, is that JA will continue to be a home for advertising scholars around the world to share their research on advertising theory and its relationship to practice, and to provide a place where our search for truth in advertising is at the heart of this amazing journal and discipline.

Shelly Rodgers
Editor in Chief

Acknowledgments

My sincerest thanks to Evgeniia Belobrovkina, Pat Rose, Herbert Jack Rotfeld, Jon Stemmle, Debbie Treise, Ting-Hao Tsou, and Weilu Zhang for giving input into the development of this editorial.