Charting the path forward for the International Journal of Advertising

The International Journal of Advertising (IJA) is now entering its 40th year of publication. As such, it is timely to reflect on the journal’s history and what path it should take going forward. I am pleased to report that by objective measures, IJA has continued to increase its profile and stature as evidenced by the journal being elevated to an “A” ranking by the Australian Business Dean’s Council in 2019, holding a 3.606 SSCI impact factor for 2019, and being ranked in the top quartile of both marketing and advertising journals for the past four years by Scimago, among other accolades. Moreover, submissions are at an all-time high. While all of this is good news, it is important to reflect on how the journal can build on its success and reach new heights going forward.

In thinking about the future, it is important to reflect on the past and what aspects of the journal remain constant over time. IJA was founded by and is owned by the Advertising Association of the United Kingdom and is a peer-reviewed academic journal. As a result, while the papers are academic in nature and need a strong conceptual framework or theory base, managerial relevance and implications are highly valued. Moreover, the Advertising Association and the journal’s editors have encouraged work on advertising societal impacts, including public policy issues. This positioning has not changed and will remain in place.

While IJA contains the word “International” in its name, the journal has always been devoted to general advertising issues, and papers do not need to be cross-cultural or focused on an inherently “international” issue. That said, having been based in and edited out of London, the journal has a longer history of having a geographically diverse Editorial Review Board and author base. Strong relationships with the European Advertising Academy, whose annual ICORIA conference is the “home conference” of IJA where Editorial Review Board meetings are held, along with excellent relationships with the Asian-based Global Alliance of Marketing and Management Association (whose partners include the American Marketing Association, the European Marketing Association, and ANZMAC among others) as well as the American Academy of Advertising foster the global nature of the journal. This global diversity will remain a goal.

In terms of the path forward, it is timely that the lead article in this issue authored by Naveen Donthu, a top scholar in the marketing field and co-editor in chief of the Journal of Business Research, and co-authors Satish Kumar and Debidutta Pattnaik (hereafter “Donthu article”) analyzes the intellectual structure and publication pattern of the journal between 1982 and 2019. In addition to documenting the increased influence of IJA in terms of overall citations and citations in highly rated journals, the authors identify the most cited articles in the journal’s history. Something that is clear from examining the Donthu paper’s list of most influential articles published in IJA is that strong papers published near the time of a trend or shift in the field can be highly impactful. For example, Chu and Kim (2011) and Lee and Youn (2009) were early studies of factor that spur engagement in electronic word-of-mouth and impact consumer attitudes and behavior. Muntinga, Moorman and Smit (2011) wrote about brand-related social media use in a very timely fashion and the article was heavily cited. More recently, cutting edge work by De Vierman, Cauberghe and Hudders (2017), De Vierman and Hudders (2020), Schouten, Janssen and Verspaget (2020) on influencer marketing, and Bergkvist and Zhou’s (2019) critical review of recent work on cause-related marketing is already being highly read and cited. Thus, the journal will continue to welcome submissions on current and trending topics and will regularly run special issues on trending topics.

As Donthu, Kumar and Pattniak (2021) observe, IJA should also continue to focus on revamping dormant clusters, meaning that new insights on traditional topics are also very welcome. It is especially relevant, for example, to encourage work on how new media interacts with and/or affects traditional media, how agency structure has changed, how attitudes toward privacy and sustainability and/or green marketing are affected in the present environment. The Donthu article notes that work on the effects of advertising (consumption, expenditure, restriction, response, effectiveness) and global advertising in particular have become less common, and these are areas where I would like to encourage more submissions. These and many other topics remain relevant.

Some other aspects of the Donthu article warrant mention, in part as a note of thanks to the many who help to make IJA what it is. The journal published 1,576 articles between 1982 and 2019, indicative of major effort by authors, Associate Editors, Editorial Review Board members, and ad hoc reviewers. IJA has been truly blessed by hard working individuals in the field that help make the journal what it is. Table 2 in Donthu’s article shows the authors who have published the most papers in IJA. While the two most recent editors of IJA (my esteemed predecessor Doug West and myself) show at the top the list, they should be considered as being in a separate category as editorials are included in the total. The list itself reads like a who is who of advertising researchers, with prominent researchers from across the world represented, led by Patrick de Pelsmacker and Edith Smit who have both published 13 peer-reviewed papers in IJA, followed closely followed by Martin Eisend with 12. While space does not permit naming all key contributors in this editorial, it is my hope that those listed in Donthu’s Table 3 take pride in being among IJA’s most prolific authors.

It is also notable that the list of leading institutional affiliations (Table 4) closely resembles a list of the top advertising programs in the world, with programs such as University of Amsterdam, University of Georgia, Ghent University, University of Texas at Austin, Michigan State University, University of Antwerp, Southern Methodist, and Northwestern University and the London Business School, among others being prominently featured. Given the unique nature of academic study of advertising, which is split between a relatively smaller number of large advertising programs in Communications/Journalism schools and a large number of business schools, but with fewer faculty proportionately specializing in advertising, it is likely that this trend will continue. Advertising benefits as a discipline from being studied from multiple perspectives even if, at times, this unfairly holds down rankings as a result of being “caught” between two major fields (business and communications), as appears to be the case currently with the Academic Journal guide of the Chartered Association of Business Schools (UK) where IJA is ranked a category below some other journals ranked a category above it on multiple objective measures. It is my hope that this will change in the next ranking cycle as there is an irony in that IJA is UK published and owned and has a strong reputation throughout Europe, North America, Asia, and the rest of the world.

It is a real pleasure to see the widespread diversity of countries that IJA authors come from in Donthu’s Table 5. While the U.S. and the UK lead the way, the split across many countries is notable and compares favorably to many other journals. It is also encouraging to see the prominence of other journals that cite IJA most often, something that clearly reinforces the journal’s stature. With the continued support of the Advertising Association, Routledge, Taylor, and Francis, the Associate Editors, and the reviewers, I look forward to even better things ahead for IJA.