Special Section Introduction—Reimagining Advertising Research: 50 Years and Beyond

This special section marks the end of the 50th year of publications for the Journal of Advertising (JA) and the beginning of what we hope will be a "reimagined" future for advertising research. When reaching major milestone anniversaries, one is motivated to look back to the past or forward to the future (or both). When JA was first published in 1972, advertising was confined to mass mediated communication and its boundaries were drawn by four classes of mass media (newspapers, magazines, television, and radio) (Richards and Curran 2002). Today, advertising is more broadly defined, unfettered from any particular media or technology (Dahlen and Rosengren 2016), and digital technology companies, such as Google and Meta, have emerged as the biggest advertising companies (Helberger et al. 2020). Despite the enormous changes over the past five decades, the topics and research questions examined by advertising researchers in 1972 remain important and prevalent in today’s advertising scholarship, and we believe many of these will still be important in the future.

However, recent years have seen tremendous changes in advertising. Technological innovations such as data-driven computational advertising, machine-learning algorithms, and artificial intelligence (AI) have altered the nature of advertising messages, processes, and outcomes. Transformations in the communication and media industries, along with the development of user-generated and user-shared content, have become dominant forces in the advertising industry, creating challenges to traditional definitions and boundaries of the field (Dahlen and Rosengren 2016; Huh and Malthouse 2020; Li 2019). In addition, dynamic social and cultural shifts in society have been propelling rapid transformations that can open new avenues for advertising research and theory (McDonald, Laverie, and Manis 2021). Therefore, to commemorate the 50th anniversary, this special section has chosen to try to look to the future, asking contributors to indicate a topic they think will be important and to propose new theories or ideas that can be fruitful in studying and explaining advertising in the years ahead. A total of 30 papers were submitted in response to this call and from these, five articles were selected to be included in this special section.

Summary and Key Contributions of Articles

The first two articles address social and cultural transformations that are taking place in the broader world in which advertising exists. Both are likely to have important implications for future advertising research. “Transformative Advertising Research: Reimagining the Future of Advertising,” by Gurrieri, Zayer, and Coleman (2022) suggests the need for future advertising research to focus more attention on institutional aspect of advertising and how advertising can work for the betterment of society. This focus is aimed at addressing growing social, cultural, and environmental concerns and criticisms of advertising’s role in contributing to some of these problems. Although this work proposes an important new subfield for research direction, it hearkens back to the early institutional and social responsibility notion of advertising proposed by the pioneering scholars in the advertising field (e.g., Sandage 1972).

The tensions and dilemma between social and commercial goals in advertising, especially considering the ongoing social and cultural transformation in the macro environment, compels a greater need to focus on conducting transformative advertising research to examine not only problems but also opportunities to solve them. While the authors focus on a particular topical issue to develop a concrete example of a research agenda for Transformative Advertising Research (TAR), the overall conceptual framework can be applied across many topics and levels of investigation (macro, meso, and micro) and should inspire future research addressing the role of advertising in promoting social change for the well-being of all stakeholders in the advertising ecosystem.

In “Breaking Gender Binaries,” Eisend and Rößner (2022) address the changing views of gender and its impact on future advertising research methods and theories. Sex and gender have been among the most frequently examined variables in social science (and advertising) research. Yet current views have made it clear that gender is a far more complex construct than what has been traditionally conceptualized and operationalized. Based on a review of research on gender from multiple disciplines, this article presents compelling and innovative ideas for transforming the age-old concept of gender into complex and fluid constructs of gender identity and gender expression. Reflecting on prior research and theory on gender representation and portrayal in ads, and the influence of gender in advertising message processing and effects, the authors critique the extant research, identify gaps, and raise questions about our knowledge from binary views of gender.

Gender fluidity implies that fundamental changes are needed in how sex/gender variables are conceptualized, measured, and manipulated in advertising research. From a societal perspective, these ideas can contribute to a more inclusive and accurate view of gender. For advertising scholars, they hold the promise of developing theories that are better able to indicate how, when, and why gender influences advertising outcomes.

The other three articles are focused on futuristic technologies that may fundamentally change communication and transform advertising. Technological advances related to data economy, immersive/extended reality, and AI-driven communication have shown the potential to make advertising more efficient and effective and even transcend time and physical space limitations. Given that the development of technology-enabled and data-driven advertising research and practice has been primarily driven by science and engineering disciplines, advertising scholarship and theory development in these areas seem overdue and critically needed.

In “The Future of Dataveillance in Advertising Theory and Practice,” Strycharz and Segijn (2022) look at the growing trend of data-driven advertising – automated and continuous collection and processing of consumer personal information and behavioral data and its use in advertising targeting and personalization. Data are considered the new currency in today’s advertising ecosystem (Helberger et al. 2020). Consumer data collection points are rapidly expanding, and data-driven computational advertising is quickly growing across all advertising media. Riding this wave, a great deal of research attention and investment have been poured into developing, testing, and applying various data-colleting, aggregating, and mining tools and technological infrastructure. This is facilitating an ever-increasing form of automatic, hyper-personalized advertising. However, research on the consumer’s perspective has been lagging behind advertiser and technology company-centric research.

Strycharz and Segijn (2022) propose a conceptual model, which they named Dataveillance Effects in Advertising Landscape (DEAL) framework, for examining consumers’ beliefs and perceptions about personal data collection and data-driven advertising, and the impact these beliefs can have on their reactions to data-driven ads. In this framework, consumers are not just conceptualized as passive targets of data-driven personalized advertising but are considered as important stakeholders in the data-driven advertising ecosystem with certain agency determining their responses to dataveillance and the ads it produces. Playing a key role in consumer reactions to data-driven advertising is their dataveillance beliefs (both accurate and inaccurate), which are formed based on personal experience, companies’ dataveillance disclosure, literacy education, and information from other sources. Guided by the DEAL framework, this article goes on to suggest a program of needed research in the future. The outcome of this can have profound effects on regulation and evidence-based policy development regarding technology-enabled, data-driven advertising and consumer protection in the coming years.

Ahn, Kim, and Kim (2022) provided a futuristic and forward-looking view into immersive/extended-reality technology and its implications for advertising practice and research in their article, “The Bifold Triadic Relationships Framework: A Theoretical Primer for Advertising Research in the Metaverse.” New immersive/extended-reality technologies are constantly expanding human communicative experience and offer especially great promise to extend and improve human ability to connect, interact, and communicate with one another, obtain and share information, and experience products, services, and consumption environments. They also cause transformative impact on advertising processes and effects. Focusing on the relationships and interactions between consumers and immersive/extended-reality technologies with varying communication affordances, the authors propose the Bifold Triadic Relationships Model to help scholars understand how advertising may work in the metaverse.

While much of the emerging research on AI advertising focuses on technology developments and applications, the final paper “Asking Questions of AI Advertising: A Maieutic Approach” by Coffin (2022) suggests that in the future, we should be asking a wider range of different types of questions across the ontological, technical, and ethical lines of inquiries. To guide future research development on AI and advertising, the author adopts the maieutic approach and proposes a range of questions reflecting on past advertising scholarship, the nature of AI-driven advertising transformation that is occurring or may occur in the future, and its impact on various stakeholders in the AI advertising ecosystem. While this is certainly true for AI and new technology in general, advertising researchers in virtually any area of inquiry would benefit from considering the interconnected technical, ethical, and ontological questions related to their area of study.

In sum, we believe that all the selected papers propose some kind of transformational shift in advertising scholarship and theory development. Some are more reflective and engage in thought-provoking axiological, ontological, and epistemological discussion of advertising scholarship to propose important future research directions through a fresh lens (Coffin 2022; Eisend and Rößner 2022; Gurrieri, Zayer, and Coleman 2022). Some are more futuristic and contemplate new technology-driven phenomena that are emerging, or yet to emerge, on the ever-expanding horizons of advertising (Ahn, Kim, and Kim 2022; Coffin 2022; Strycharz and Segijn 2022). Together, we believe both approaches serve the field well as we begin to contemplate advances in advertising scholarship in the next 50 years.

Closing and Looking toward the Future

We fully recognize that predicting the future can be a fool’s errand. When the Journal of Advertising was born, the majority of Americans had just a handful of available television stations from which to select what to view. Who would have foreseen then the development of the personal computer and the impact it would have? Who could have predicted we would walk around with screens in our pockets, and we could ask them to find out information for us on just about anything? What researcher would have envisioned the popularity and impact of social media? These were the things of science fiction, not topics for advertising researchers to explore.

However, we believe that to be relevant and useful, advertising researchers need to start considering and preparing for what is likely to come in the future. To be fully relevant, advertising scholars need to be at the cutting edge of new technologies and social changes, not trailing behind these changes after they have already happened. We believe that this will require not only being knowledgeable about new developments in advertising and directly related fields, but also in a wide range of other fields, along with a recognition of social changes as they begin to emerge. In JA’s first 50 years, most of our ideas came from highly related disciplines like communications, marketing, psychology, and sociology, with a smattering from economics and law. The future, as suggested in the articles here, may require more understanding and collaboration with more distant fields such as engineering, compute science, information and data science, gender studies, neuroscience and medicine, ethics, and philosophy. Additionally, we will need to be aware of social and political trends. Collaborating with others in diverse fields that could become important in advertising will be an important step to accomplish this. Obviously, no one person can keep up with all areas. However, it may be worthwhile for each of us to identify and become more familiar with current research in one or two areas that may impact the evolution of advertising for our research area of interest. We may often be wrong in predicting what will become important. But even this can help us to recognize when and why changes occur and are diffused. This will allow us to refine our research choices in the future. And when we are right, we can be a leading voice at the forefront of change, with a seat at the table in helping to determine the important questions to ask and the issues to examine. This is what we can and should aspire to do in the next 50 years!

It is our hope that this special anniversary issue of JA will spur more thought toward the on-going and potential future changes to advertising as well as to changes in cultures and societies. We will not only need to refine and advance existing areas of advertising research and theories, but also to participate in developing new ones that can boldly go where no advertising research has gone before. To do so will likely need us to build bridges to scholars and understand new developments in a wide range of different disciplines. It is through this awareness and vision that we can best prepare to develop research that will be at the forefront of advertising advances. That is the mission and challenge for the next 50 years of JA. Good luck!

Acknowledgments

We thank JA Editor-in-Chief Shelly Rodgers for her valuable feedback and support throughout the whole process of developing and putting together this special section. We also acknowledge contributions of all of the authors who submitted their work and all reviewers who reviewed the submitted articles and provided constructive feedback and suggestions.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jisu Huh

Jisu Huh (PhD, University of Georgia) is a professor and the Raymond O. Mithun Chair in Advertising, Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Minnesota.

Ronald J. Faber

Ronald J. Faber (PhD, University of Wisconsin) is a professor emeritus, Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Minnesota