The Ideal Advertising Professor: A ZMET-Based Inquiry

Abstract

Advertising departments in universities worldwide must grapple with a fast-changing industry that continues to redefine itself amid technological change and disruption. It is a reality that has prompted extensive discussion among researchers, educators, administrators, and advertising practitioners. There have been workshops addressing the need to consider the skills and qualifications of the contemporary advertising professor. However, left out of the conversation are the students, and thus their expectations about their instructors remain largely unknown. How do students imagine the ideal advertising professor? What qualities are they looking for? What do they want to learn, and how do they envision their relationship with their advertising professors? We explored students’ mindset using the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET), obtaining rich insight into their thoughts, feelings, and expectations about the ideal advertising professor. The study can serve as a tool of reflection for advertising educators about their teaching practices, and of assessment for advertising departments during hiring and promotion.

Introduction

Advertising programs in universities across the world face significant challenges in structuring and diversifying course offerings, particularly as they try to keep up with a fast-changing industry (e.g., Banning and Schweitzer 2007; Kim and Patel 2012; Fang, Wei, and Huang 2019). Another particularly challenging task is to determine the qualifications and competencies of the contemporary advertising instructor (Banning and Schweitzer 2007; Gale and Robbs 2004). Uniquely, advertising is a discipline in which: business, psychology, information science and technology, art, and media practice converge, creating a need to secure multifaceted talent in hiring faculty. Further fueled by a surge of changes in digital platforms and communication technologies, the proverbial need to bridge the academic–practitioner gap manifests itself more acutely than ever, leading to high demand for skilled advertising instructors with contemporary professional qualifications and competencies that span more than one field (see Kim 2012; Neill and Schauster 2015).

The importance of finding instructors who can teach a relevant and timely curriculum can hardly be overstated (Kim 2012; Neill and Schauster 2015). There is consensus among faculty that a capable professor matters just as much, if not more, than the content they are teaching (Lancaster, Katz, and Cho 1990; Banning and Schweitzer 2007). The assignment of greater importance to delivery versus content in higher education has long been the topic of generative conversation among scholars and practitioners (e.g., Worchel, Andreoli, and Eason 1975; Alps 2006; Berger and Iyengar 2013; Davies 2013). Without engaging that conversation in-depth, we contend that the two are intrinsically interdependent. Yet, while continuous effort has been devoted to developing exemplary advertising curricula (Robbs 1995; Slayden, Broyles, and Kendrick 1998; Rose and Robbs 2001; Chambers 2003; Gould 2004; Larsen and Len-Rios 2006; Stuhlfaut and Berman 2010), much less is known about the ideal instructor that should develop and deliver the courses. To fill this gap in advertising research and knowledge, the present study attempts to answer the question: What is the profile of the ideal advertising professor?

Within the halls of academia, there have been several workshops and conference sessions addressing the need to consider the skills and qualifications of the contemporary advertising instructor. Such events, involving a mix of faculty and advertising professionals, have been organized with various degrees of regularity by organizations such as AEJMC’s (Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication) Advertising Division or the AAA (American Academy of Advertising). Alumni associations and advertising professionals have been involved by individual advertising departments at several universities in similar exercises. The question has also been explored by some advertising pedagogy researchers, who probed faculty and experts on their views on what constitutes a good advertising instructor (e.g., Robbs and Broyles 2012). However, the students are left out of the conversation, and thus their expectations about their advertising instructors remain largely unknown. How do students imagine the ideal advertising professor? For what qualities are they looking? What do they want to learn, and how do they envision their relationship with their advertising professors?

The present study offers a much needed, first of its kind, in-depth investigation of the topic from the perspective of the students. This perspective is valuable particularly in the US. Because competition among universities is high and one’s education comes at a considerable financial cost, administrators favor a student-centric approach to higher education, with students engaged as active partners in the education process (Cook-Sather 2006; Gravett, Kinchin, and Winstone 2020). Student feedback is even considered an essential part of performance evaluation for fixed-term instructors, tenured and tenure-track professors. At most colleges and universities, professors’ salaries, reappointment, promotion, and tenure advancement depend in part on whether they meet the expectations of their students (Algozzine, Putnam, and Horner 2010).

We should clarify at the outset that while arguing for the value and necessity of considering students’ opinions, we are not endorsing a primarily customer-centric perspective of higher education, one which might imply that students’ views are the most important determinant of what constitutes an ideal advertising professor. Rather, we see students as one of several important stakeholders in the debate about the characteristics of the ideal advertising instructor. As such, it is crucial that their views be explored, particularly since prior research has not considered the student perspective.

With that in mind, both advertising faculty and program administrators would benefit from knowing what students expect from an ideal advertising professor. Furthermore, students themselves stand to gain from actions taken by faculty and administrators to meet this ideal once it is known. When college professors’ qualifications and personal characteristics match student expectations, retention and satisfaction with the program may also increase (Elliott and Healy 2001).

Of course, students’ expectations must first be identified, to be met. To date, no study has examined the profile of an ideal advertising professor from the students’ perspective. Robbs and Broyles (2012) conducted 15 in-depth interviews with experienced, award-winning advertising professors to identify the “goals, values and attributes of [exemplary] advertising educators.” Although offering a much-needed contribution to the literature, Robbs and Broyles (2012) did not examine the expectations of students. Furthermore, most of the attributes identified by their interviewees were not unique to advertising instructors: they could describe just as well exemplary professors in other academic disciplines. Very few articles contain insights uniquely applicable to advertising instructors (e.g., Lee and Ryan 2005; Banning and Schweitzer 2007) and, so far, none have sought to identify what constitutes an ideal advertising professor from a student perspective. The present article expands and complements Robbs and Broyles (2012) by attempting to answer the question, “How do students imagine the ideal advertising professor?” in a manner that empowered students to define their perceptions and expectations without constraints imposed by the researchers. To that end, we employed a participant-driven, rather than a researcher-driven, mode of inquiry. Our goal was to offer a comprehensive and integrative view of students’ mental perceptions of the ideal advertising instructor. Capturing a holistic mindset with granular details and nuances is informative and conducive to further inquiry, dialog, and, potentially, beneficial action from faculty and administrators.

As such, the contribution of this article to advertising research and pedagogy is threefold. First, it advances knowledge by providing the first nuanced and integrative view of how students might envision the ideal advertising professor – revealing, among other things, what students expect from interactions with advertising faculty. Second, it has high practical applicability as it presents data-driven, actionable recommendations to advertising instructors at both the early and late stages of an academic career. Third, it makes a methodological contribution to advertising education research by highlighting the applicability of a particular research protocol (ZMET; Zaltman 1997; Zaltman and Coulter 1995) – never before used to examine student perceptions of teachers in any academic discipline – to generate in-depth knowledge and much-needed insights.

Following a brief review of the literature and a rationale for using the ZMET protocol to elicit the insights, the findings – partly intuitive, partly surprising – are discussed in detail along with their potential theoretical and practical implications. Limitations and suggestions for future research are presented at the end.

A brief review of the literature: Contextualizing the present study

We first conducted a review of the literature in the field’s dedicated journals (alphabetically: International Journal of Advertising, Journal of Advertising, Journal of Advertising Education, Journal of Advertising Research, Journal of Current Issues and Research in Advertising and Journal of Interactive Advertising). Two issues became immediately apparent. First, as noted by Banning and Schweitzer (2007), there has been a noticeable lack of research on advertising teaching in general during the last couple of decades, especially compared with the final three decades of the 20th century. This paucity by itself reduced the likelihood of us finding recent articles on what students might expect from their advertising professors. Second, even as we widened the time span to review articles going back more than 50 years, no relevant study emerged – although some researchers did examine student perceptions of various other advertising-related issues (e.g., the article by Fullerton, Kendrick, and Frazier (2009) on student career preferences). Given the current state of the literature, the contribution made by the present article appears even more valuable.

As a second step, we expanded the scope of the search by eliminating journal title restrictions. Thus, we included all academic articles on topics related to student perceptions of college professors, regardless of the journal in which they appeared. Since college students have evaluated instructor performance since the 1920s (e.g., Breed 1927; see Algozzine, Putnam, and Horner 2010), we unsurprisingly found a rich research literature here. Although it is beyond the scope of this paper to provide an extensive review of research on student perceptions of effective teachers in other academic disciplines, a brief assessment of extant research is warranted so the reader can situate this article within that larger body of literature.

None of the articles identified in the second step focused on advertising students or advertising education. We found instead research on student perceptions of college instructors in numerous other fields, including criminal justice (e.g., Acker 2003), chemistry (e.g., Black and Deci 2000), medicine (e.g., Lempp and Seale 2004), accounting (e.g., Bobe and Cooper 2020; Gravett, Kinchin, and Winstone 2020), business (e.g., Jackson 2003) or journalism (e.g., Wood, Brunner, and Fitch-Hauser 2008).

Overwhelmingly, those assessments were based on quantitative approaches. They were either quantitative analyses of responses to questionnaires developed by a study’s authors, or quantitative analyses of standardized student evaluations of teaching (SETs; e.g., Miron and Segal 1978; Feldman 1988; Young and Shaw 1999; Strage 2008; Hill and Christian 2012; Woods et al. 2012; Douna et al. 2015; Joseph 2016; Knoster et al. 2021). An illustrative example is Pepe and Wang (2012), who analyzed all SETs at a large US university from fall 2002 through spring 2009. A total of 294,692 completed SET questionnaires were included in the analysis. The data showed that students rewarded with higher evaluation scores, instructors whom they perceived as organized and clear communicators. Additionally, students connected the level of respect and concern shown by the instructor, and their interest in student learning, with the overall score given to the instructor. Individual instructor characteristics were not considered in the study.

Whether one can draw valid inferences about what may constitute an ideal professor from SET data remains questionable. There is an emerging consensus that student feedback scores are not valid indicators of college professors’ professional competency (see Sojka, Gupta, and Deeter-Schmelz 2002; Onwuegbuzie et al. 2007; Young, Rush, and Shaw 2009; Love and Kotchen 2010; Uttl, White, and Gonzalez 2017). The meta-analysis of Uttl, White, and Gonzalez (2017), for example, concluded that students do not learn more from instructors with high student evaluation ratings and that such evaluations only provide a subjective perception of satisfaction.

Yet the point remains that, regardless of whether it uses standardized SETs or original questionnaires, most research on student perceptions of college professors relies on quantitative survey approaches. The merits of survey research notwithstanding (see Tourangeau 2004; Ruel, Wagner, and Gillespie 2015), over-reliance on this method inhibits discovery and depth of understanding. For a start, such questionnaires are limited to measuring agreement or disagreement with statements considered relevant to the topic by the researchers. Thus, checklist surveys incur a high risk of omission: they preclude the discovery of any views or opinions that may be important for the respondents, but were not envisioned as relevant by the experts who designed the questionnaire (Whitmarsh 2009; Henry 2000). Should we have created our own survey to determine students’ perceptions of the ideal advertising professor, the results would have been limited to validation, or invalidation, of our own views on the topic. Further, survey results are often distorted by acquiescence bias, which is the respondents’ tendency to agree with certain statements on a questionnaire, even if they never thought those issues were relevant to the topic prior to taking the survey (Whitmarsh 2009). Had we surveyed students and asked, “To what extent is the attendance of industry conferences a required characteristic of the ideal advertising professor?” they might have indicated a great extent, even if, prior to being asked, they would not have considered this aspect important or might not even have been aware of it.

Because our goal was to avoid influencing participants’ views, a respondent-driven approach to data collection was needed rather than a researcher-driven approach. The choice of research method, explained in the following paragraphs, outlines the methodological contribution of this study to advertising education research.

Method

We explored advertising students’ mental representations of the ideal advertising professor using a variant of The ZMET (Zaltman 1997; Zaltman and Coulter 1995). ZMET involves the use of in-depth, semi-structured personal interviews centered on visual images. The images are selected and brought to the interview by the research participants themselves, after being instructed days in advance to gather a set of pictures representing their thoughts and feelings about the topic of study.

ZMET differs from most social science research techniques in that it employs images rather than words to elicit the mindset of participants. We selected ZMET following Zaltman (1997), who cogently argued that choice and development of research methods should be guided by knowledge of the phenomena under study, and that the image-based ZMET is demonstrably better than verbocentric techniques (surveys, interviews, focus groups) at revealing complex mental perceptions of a particular issue. Below we summarize the gist of Zaltman’s (1997) argument.

First, there is evidence in psychology and neuroscience that most thoughts occur as images rather than words (see Feryok and Pryde 2012; Valkola 2012; Pinker 1994; Damásio 1994). Verbal language is indeed needed for conveying our thoughts to others, but the thoughts themselves result from processing stimuli encoded in our brains. Those stimuli are overwhelmingly visual (Kosslyn et al. 1990; Kanwisher and Wojciulik 2000; Cumming and Williams 2012). Even intuitively, we speak of mental imagery, not mental sentences. Barthes and Heath (1977) observed decades ago that images are polysemous (i.e., they encapsulate multiple meanings) and can reflect the mental structures of feeling and thought to a greater extent than words. Many subsequent studies supported the notion that images are superior to words in terms of ability to encapsulate and reflect mental meanings and structures (for evidence and reviews, see Harper 2002; Khoo-Lattimore, Thyne, and Robertson 2009; Christensen and Olson 2002; Devine-Wright and Devine-Wright 2009). Evolutionary psychologists lent further weight to this argument by noting that visual representations and conceptual capabilities in the brain existed before formal language development (Edelman 1992). To no surprise, image-based thought elicitation research has been successfully employed in a variety of disciplines, including psychotherapy, anthropology, and cultural sociology (e.g., Ingram 1994; Kopp 1995; Williams and Whitehouse 2015; Richard and Lahman 2015).

The second advantage of images is that they can reveal unconscious beliefs and emotions better than language, which typically is an expression of conscious thought (Zaltman 1997; Belk, Wallendorf, and Sherry 1989; Holbrook 1987; Michael et al. 2019). Thus, research techniques relying exclusively on participants’ words to elicit thoughts on an issue could overlook essential components of the participants’ mindset. Photo elicitation techniques do not only produce more information than purely verbocentric approaches; they also reveal different kinds of information (Harper 2002).

A third reason for employing ZMET is that mental knowledge is stored in networks of nodes whereby factual information is intertwined with emotional, experiential, and interpretive information (e.g., Anderson 1983; Anderson et al. 2004). Neural pathways and nodes reflecting these types of information are simultaneously activated when one is prompted to think about a topic (such as the ideal advertising professor). Research must therefore illuminate all these mental structures. It must go beyond uncovering factual information (i.e., specific facts about an ideal professor) to reveal emotional knowledge (feelings and emotional expectations accompanying that imagined ideal), experiential knowledge (reflecting past interactions with admired professors, which shaped one’s imagined experience of an ideal professor) as well as interpretive knowledge (the personal meanings assigned to all that information) (see Zaltman 1997; Coulter, Zaltman, and Coulter 2001; Ling et al. 2009). Verbocentric research captures mainly factual information and is limited in its ability to elicit interpretive and emotional knowledge. Unconscious feelings and meanings that require elaboration and introspective analysis also escape most verbocentric inquiries.

The final and perhaps most important argument invoked by Zaltman (1997) is that ZMET is uniquely designed to capture the hidden, underlying metaphors or structures of thinking that tie together one’s mental perceptions of an issue. ZMET rests on the premise that metaphors, which can encompass visual imagery, emotion, and factual knowledge concurrently, serve as the fundamental underlying structures of human thought (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Honeck 1996; Gibbs 2011). By revealing the deep metaphors which subsume someone’s views on a topic, researchers can access that mindset. Indeed, metaphors have been proven particularly effective at facilitating access to various types of information, including otherwise hidden knowledge (Glucksberg 1995; Ling et al. 2009; Stuhlfaut and Vanden Bergh 2014).

Therefore, the ZMET protocol appeared to be a perfectly suited technique for the purpose of answering the present research questions.

The only available study employing ZMET to investigate matters related to advertising provides a perfect illustration of what this technique can achieve. Coulter, Zaltman, and Coulter (2001) used metaphor elicitation to uncover consumer perceptions of advertising as a phenomenon. Several conceptual metaphors emerged during the interviews. Some participants indicated positive views. They perceived advertising as a hostess, teacher, counselor, or enabler (due to its information value), as a performer or magician (due to its entertainment value), or as an engine (because it drives economic growth). Other conceptual metaphors (conman, nosy neighbor, evil therapist, seducer, and omnipresent being) reflected perceived criticisms of advertising and had a negative connotation. Both the positive and the negative conceptual metaphors, in turn, reflected the underlying dimensions or deep metaphors of advertising as a resource, as a force, and as a tool for portraying idealized images of people and products (Coulter, Zaltman, and Coulter 2001).

The ZMET protocol has been employed in several other research domains, but to our knowledge, its potential has never been actualized in pedagogical research. Phenomenon exploration through ZMET includes topics as diverse as consumer perceptions of the adoption of mobile banking (Lee et al. 2003), leisure activities (Christensen and Olson 2002), climate change (Anghelcev et al. 2015), consumer home choice (Khoo-Lattimore, Thyne, and Robertson 2009) or the role of social media in the employment process (Danileț and Stoian 2017). This study illustrates the potential of ZMET as a useful technique in research on advertising pedagogy.

Research questions

The study’s overarching goal was to provide comprehensive insight into what advertising students perceive as an ideal advertising professor, for the first time in the advertising research literature. A secondary objective was to illustrate the applicability of ZMET as an exploratory research technique to research in advertising education.

Specifically, the study was designed to answer the following research questions:

1. How is “the ideal advertising professor” perceived by our sample of advertising students?

2. What conceptual themes define their mental representations of an ideal advertising professor?

3. What deep metaphors or organizing structures of knowledge underlie their mental representations of an ideal advertising professor?

Sample

ZMET research employs small purposive samples. A purposive sample of advertising students from two research universities in the US (N = 12) was used. Half of the students were from a large research university in the Midwestern US and half from a large research university in the northeastern US. One of the universities had a dedicated advertising department in a school, the other a dedicated advertising and public relations department. All participants had taken at least one advertising course and were taking or intended to take another. Half were juniors, and half were first-semester seniors. Seven were advertising majors. Other majors included public relations, communication, and business. Nine participants self-identified as female and three as male.

Data were collected before the COVID-19 pandemic. Studies designed to test the validity of ZMET have shown that four to five in-depth interviews can provide about 90% of the information available from a much larger set of interviews (Zaltman 1997; Zaltman and Coulter 1995). The number of participants should be gradually increased until new interviews fail to generate significant new insights. Once that saturation point has been reached, it is unnecessary to add new participants (Zaltman 1997; Christensen and Olson 2002). In the present study, saturation was attained by the tenth interview. Two more interviews were conducted to ensure we had achieved saturation. The final two interviews confirmed that saturation had been reached and no additional participants were needed.

Procedure

Participants were advised to spend a few days selecting 10-15 images that reflected their views, thoughts, and feelings about “the ideal advertising professor,” save those images and email them to the researcher. Afterward, each participant took part in a semi-structured, one-on-one interview centered on the self-selected images. The interviewer was either one of the authors (who posed as graduate students at a different US university) or a graduate research assistant. Each interview lasted circa 90 minutes and followed the 5-step protocol described below. All participants volunteered to be part of the study and received extra credit from their instructors.

During step 1, known as storytelling, participants were asked to explain how each image reflected their views of the ideal advertising professor. Their explanations allowed the researchers to understand the meanings assigned to each image without making assumptions. The insights were particularly useful in the case of symbolic/ambiguous images. For example, one participant explained that she selected the image of a theater play to express her belief that professors should make advertising classes entertaining. She went on to describe her experience with a professor who always had volunteers from the class play live music during the 10-minute breaks in his lecture, which in her opinion facilitated learning. This example illustrates the importance she placed on the entertainment aspect of a teacher’s performance within the learning environment.

In step 2, respondents were asked if there were any images they wished they had brought to the interview, but could not find. Missing images could reflect significant elements of one’s mindset about a topic and should not be overlooked (Zaltman 1997). However, perhaps due to the availability of various images on the internet, this step served merely as a check rather than a source of new insights. Participants did not report any missing images.

Step 3 elicited further meaning by comparing and contrasting 2-3 images selected in a “random” manner. Here, instead of selecting random images, we modified the ZMET protocol to select images whose meanings had not been fully clarified in step 1. During this phase, we asked each participant how two of their images were similar to each other, yet different from a third, then followed with probing questions designed to elicit interrelated constructs (see Reynolds and Gutman 1988).

During step 4, participants were asked to identify the three images that best illustrated the concept of “the ideal advertising professor” (i.e., the most representative pictures) and explain why they had selected those particular images. The goal of this step was to provide an understanding of the relative importance of various personality or professional characteristics of this ideal.

Step 5 involved the creation of a collage, or summary image, by each participant. The images were grouped on a single screen and arranged until the participant considered the resulting collage to be the best reflection of their mindset. This step is designed to reveal the relative importance of the images and how they conceptually relate to one another (or how they are dissociated). Examples of two such collages are provided in the appendix. All interviews were transcribed by a research assistant and reviewed by the authors.

Results

Metaphor analysis

A narrative analysis of the interviews was performed independently by three of the authors. The first step was to identify the list of themes invoked by the participants as they described their thoughts and feelings about the ideal advertising professor. Examples of recurring themes (or thematic categories) identified in the transcripts included trusting, available, confident, compassionate, empathetic, encouraging, etc. The authors then compared the list of themes they had identified independently, agreed on the final list of emerging themes, and grouped those thematic categories under 16 conceptual metaphors. Conceptual metaphors are underlying structures of thought that encompass factual, emotional, and experiential information associated with interrelated themes. For example, during the interviews, participants made connections between the themes: empathetic, understanding, advisory, and compassionate. These were grouped under the conceptual metaphor “counselor.” Following previous studies (e.g., Christensen and Olson 2002), deep metaphors were then identified by analyzing relationships and similarities among the conceptual metaphors.

This systematic, inductive approach to data analysis is grounded in qualitative data analytic techniques (Creswell 2008; Patton 1990; Denzin and Lincoln 1998). The resulting deep metaphors and corresponding conceptual metaphors are presented in Table 1 below, followed by details about relevant conceptual themes and illustrative quotes.

Table

Deep metaphors	Conceptual metaphors
The Guide	Mentor/Career Advisor
	Counselor
The Entertainer	Comedian
	Energetic Performer
	Passionate Communicator
The Expert	Seasoned Professional
	Continuous Learner
	Multicultural Mind
The Creative Mind	Pedagogical Innovator
	Risk-Taker
	Nurturer of Creative Thought
The Education Professional	Motivator
	Knowledge Conveyor
	Classroom Leader

The Guide

The Guide emerged as a unifying deep metaphor encompassing conceptual themes related to students’ expectations that an ideal advertising professor should actively help them follow a path toward success in and beyond the classroom. The two conceptual metaphors subsumed by the deep metaphor, The Guide, were Mentor/Career Advisor (primarily associated with the themes of support, advice, professional development, and maturity) and Counselor (encompassing references to the themes of accessibility, understanding, compassion and perceptiveness). These conceptual themes underscore that students had clear and nuanced expectations about advertising instructors beyond their primary role as classroom instructors. Somewhat expectedly, the students devoted a significant part of the conversations and a high number of images to these topics, indicating the high importance they assigned to these metaphors.

Three things stood out in terms of how students perceived the roles described by the conceptual metaphors of Mentor/Career Advisor and Counselor.

First, these roles were construed as occurring within a relatively close dyadic relationship, which underscores an implicit expectation that advertising professors should know students on a personal level and should offer personalized career advice. In illustration:

[It would mean]…like you know each other on a more personal level than just like a student, like they know your name, they know your major, you can talk to them about questions and maybe advice for future classes or jobs, just a more personal level than just a student. (E., Female)

Whereas all respondents saw the ideal advertising professor as a mentor/career adviser and counselor, only some expected the professor to be responsible for initiating these roles (“like yeah, let me talk to you, come sit down and let’s have a conversation.” RS, female”). In contrast, other participants assigned this responsibility to the student (“the professors are not going to go to each student and ask them if they need help meeting people in different places, but if the student will ask them on their own time for help in that stuff and advice, then I think they should be able to be helpful.” H., female).

Second, mentorship was perceived as supporting student success beyond the classroom. In this capacity the ideal advertising professor is expected to offer guidance on how to develop a successful career as well as integrate it with other aspects of the student’s life:

I mean just…being able to talk to them about other issues, or other topics outside of the classroom or the textbooks…like the career options or what advice they would have or even [like] connections or contacts that they have that they think would be a good fit for them to be able to take advantage of because I think it is harder for students to create connections. (H., female)

Third, whereas the Mentor/Career Advisor role mostly reflected the ideal advertising professor’s capacities to offer support and impart knowledge about professional success, the Counselor role is indicative of the soft skills needed to foster those capacities. Regarding the ideal professor as Counselor, participants repeatedly explained that what fosters a supportive communicative relationship is accessibility and understanding, the availability to meet in person, a certain air of approachability (defined by most respondents as “not intimidating”):

They need to make themselves flexible or available …not only do I expect the professor to be there if I'm going to be there every Monday, Wednesday, Friday but I expect them to lend a hand out and, you know, to get across to the students that they are available more time than just class. (J., male)

I mean you should not be scared to approach them and ask them questions… If you’re too intimidating, students are just going to be struggling through the class. That was the thought of being approachable. (C., female)

Some students regarded perceptiveness as a characteristic expected particularly from an advertising professor:

I feel like an advertising professor would reach out to any type of kid and like notice things that maybe other teachers wouldn’t because I feel like it’s a very detailed thing to study…you do like read in a lot to like…emotion and expression and stuff like that. (M., female)

Worthy of note, for some students, expectations surrounding accessibility were also influenced by the students’ past interactions with bad instructors:

I think being available to students outside of the classroom because some, I have had professors that don’t make themselves available and don’t respond to emails…[in a] timely manner. I have had professors that take a week to answer you. (H., female)

The Entertainer

Both engagement with course content and learning were closely linked by students with an expectation that ideal advertising professors should deliver course content in an entertaining manner, revealing the unifying deep metaphor, The Entertainer. Students mentioned or included pictures of actors Robin Williams, Will Smith and Ryan Gosling, for example, to illustrate their views. This deep metaphor was in itself multidimensional. First, the ideal advertising professor was expected to have a comedic side (Comedian) by being able to make good jokes as well as take jokes from students. Some participants clearly mentioned they expected this in particular from an advertising professor due to the nature of the material they teach, which is perceived as fun and engaging. Students expected advertising professors to be the “cooler” professors:

Because I think it is also important for a teacher to have like some sort of a sense of humor. Like if you are [a] boring old stick in the mud and just monotone, kids are just going to fall asleep and they are not going to want to listen. Like, I don’t know, I enjoy much more, I enjoy class much more. (J., female)

Second, the ideal advertising professor was imagined as an Energetic Performer. High energy in delivering class content was considered a sign of passion and enthusiasm for advertising, revealing a close link between this conceptual metaphor and the conceptual metaphor, Passionate Communicator. These two metaphors were associated with themes like enthusiastic, upbeat mood, highly energetic and exciting. These expectations permeated all interviews, and were perhaps the most prominent mental construct elicited:

Passion to me is more like bold and just like, energetic, like almost like you are bursting, I don’t know how to describe passion but very much so things that you can’t keep in, almost like the opposite of mellow. (R., female)

Like physically…it is kind of hard to describe but they’d look energetic and excited to be there and if the teacher is not excited about the material, it is easy for you to not be excited about the material. (D., male)

The Expert

The three dimensions underlying the deep metaphor, The Expert, illustrate a refined understanding on the part of the students of what type of expertise an ideal advertising instructor should have. First and foremost, professors were expected to be knowledgeable (“You gotta have the knowledge in order to be [an] ideal advertising professor. You gotta know what you are talking about.” M., male).

In addition, virtually all participants imagined the ideal professor to have acquired first-hand expertise of the practice of advertising through significant professional engagement with the industry, revealing the conceptual metaphor, Seasoned Professional. Professional experience was discussed more extensively than the professor’s ability to impart theoretical knowledge and was highlighted as a major expectation by every single participant. Among the images selected to illustrate this conceptual metaphor were scenes from the famed advertising industry-focused television show, Mad Men. Below is an illustrative quote:

Maybe if they have been in the advertising industry or a lot of big brands. Maybe they worked under with Time Warner or Proctor and Gamble. Like they had been out in the field where they know what real advertising agencies want instead of a teacher that has gotten to know what the book says because we can read the book ourselves but if a professor can tell us what the world really wants that will help us in our futures. (C., female)

The second dimension of expertise was a rather unexpected finding and is captured by the conceptual metaphor, Continuous Learner. Advertising expertise was not considered immutable. Students described the ideal advertising professor as someone who incessantly seeks to update their knowledge by engaging in continuous learning through reading, participating at conferences, conducting research, and keeping up with the advertising industry. Two participants alluded to self-reflection and reassessment as constitutive parts of this dimension of expertise. For example:

Just because I feel like the industry’s always changing so much that [like] to be an advertising professor, like you have to keep up on it too. So like I feel like conventions and stuff like that and like lectures from other people in that business, like that helps them keep up to date to be able to reteach it…I feel like it is because then like your information and like that the way you practice would just be like more up to date and more realistic. (RS, female)

Surprisingly, only four participants emphasized the importance of remaining tech-savvy:

This one is also pretty straightforward, so I would like the teacher to be in touch with modern technology in terms of advertising. So, now a lot of it is digital and I think it is really important nowadays to know what that means and like how to advertise correctly on digital platforms and creatively on different platforms as well. (RN, female)

A set of recurring themes reflected a third dimension of expertise, consisting of cultural sensitivity and awareness. This is described by the conceptual metaphor, Multicultural Mind. Students perceived advertising as a global phenomenon and some saw the entire global market as their potential job market. They described the ideal advertising professor as worldly and well-traveled. Meaningful exposure and understanding of various cultures was perceived as a necessary precursor of the following expected characteristics: relatable, tolerant, welcoming, and open-minded, and was thought to enhance the ability of the professor to pass on valuable “real-world” knowledge to students. An example:

Just living in different [countries], or being aware of different demographics and being able to associate with different parts of the world…And yeah, so maybe just having a worldly view. The thing is we have a lot of international students and then students from out of state…and it’s just if a professor has been, or is from another place they can associate with other students that have also known other places. Also, if they have lived in other places then they can know how the job market is out there in different places. If we want to move somewhere in the future, they would know what those job markets are like. (C., female)

The Creative Mind

The Creative Mind, our fourth deep metaphor, is widely associated with advertising (e.g., Cotzias 1996; El-Murad and West 2004; Dahlén, Rosengren, and Törn 2008). Although all participants expected creativity from the ideal advertising professor, most referred to “innovativeness” rather than “imagination” when describing creativity. When prompted to elaborate, they said they expected creativity in content delivery (i.e., in the way an advertising professor would teach the class). A creative personality was understood as an added benefit that facilitated a more enjoyable learning experience. The conceptual metaphor, Pedagogical Innovator, captures these insights:

I would want a professor who’s really creative and brings different aspects into the classroom, makes the learning experience more creative and enjoyable and comes up with new ideas and ways to teach. So, like maybe games or movie clips and team activities that involve what you are learning about and things that are different than just sitting and reading in a lecture. (E., female)

Creativity when you are teaching…like you can use pop culture and like current events that are happening in the industry to engage your students, I think that’s really great. So, kind of always thinking about that and have great ideas and good creative skills when you are teaching. (S., female)

So much did participants value innovative teaching methods that they expected the ideal advertising professor to go against norms and take risks such as abandoning lesson plans, giving students the responsibility to work on real-world campaigns for real clients or even making students uncomfortable. These associations are captured by the conceptual metaphor, Risk Taker:

I have a professor that it’s an hour and a half class and he gives a 10 minute break and he always has musicians play for 5 minutes in the middle of class, in a lecture. It’s kind of weird but it is fun and it’s different and we get thinking differently and then we get back into class and it gives us something to look forward to. (C., female)

That [image] I picked because I think it resembled a risk-taker. Because I think they should take on challenging projects. I don’t know, I guess creating campaigns for real situations or actual companies. (H., female)

To illustrate her expectations, one student mentioned a psychology professor who released (harmless) snakes in class as he introduced the topic of anxiety, causing real anxiety among some students. This example illustrates both the potential negative sides of taking a risk and the degree of tolerance and expectation for unconventional pedagogical approaches:

I think he was just trying to demonstrate how anxiety comes about. I don’t think he properly executed, I don’t think I learned much in that class about anxiety but I was fearing for that girl’s life. But, I think just in the way he thought about because like what teacher thinks of bringing in live snakes to prove, to show anxiety. (RN, female)

Recurrent themes such as encouraging independent thinking, nurturing difference in opinions, and open mindedness pointed to a conceptual metaphor that we labeled, Nurturer of Creative Thought. These emerging themes were associated with the ideal advertising instructor’s ability to foster creativity among students. In illustration:

Encouraging as in like not bringing the students down for having original thoughts or inserting their own like mindsets into it, but being like, ‘Okay, maybe I don’t see your perspective, but I am still encouraging you to like explore your own path. Let’s see where it takes you.’ Or like ideally, I would want to have a creative professor who encourages different opinions…and I have actually been in a creative class, like it’s very focused on how the teacher would like an advertisement to look like, in terms of like headline, picture, or like copy versus just like letting the student explore like different layouts and different kind of ways. I had a personal experience when I tried to [do] something different and I got a really bad grade on it because it’s not what the teacher wanted. (R.N., female)

The Education Professional

The label, Education Professional, conveys a deep metaphor intended to capture the implicit transactional view of higher education endorsed by the participants. Their narratives were unequivocally tinted by a perception that advertising professors are, to some degree, paid mercenary providers of higher education services, expected to deliver a high-quality education in a manner similar to how doctors are paid to deliver informed medical advice or architectural engineers are paid to ensure safely designed bridges and buildings.

The organizing deep metaphor, Education Professional, subsumes the following three conceptual metaphors: the Motivator (challenging students to do more and instilling a sense of purpose), the Knowledge Conveyor (associated with communicating content and expectations with clarity), and the Classroom Leader (associated with confidence, planning and time management during lectures). These expectations appeared relatively devoid of emotion and were seen as necessary qualities for an ideal advertising professor. The following quotes illustrate the three conceptual metaphors in successive order. The Motivator:

I think about a professor encouraging students to dive further into a classroom concept. So, I think a big thing for me is an ideal advertising professor would be an individual who pushes students to learn more than just the basics. (J., male)

Yeah, personally maybe [the student is] just depressed or lonely or can’t really find like a path or maybe like a meaning and I could see like a confident advertising professor coming in and definitely influence them in a positive way. Almost like giving them like tough love about like, you know, you can be important and stuff like that. (S., female)

Regarding the role of Knowledge Conveyor:

This one typically pointing at the characteristics of knowledge, and not only that, but when you look at a book, things are very, very clearly articulated and I think an advertising professor needs to be able to hone, you know, that knowledge that he has and that he has gained throughout his time, not only in school but also in the workforce and be able to articulate those clearly to students. (D., male)

Finally, the Classroom Leader:

If a professor walks in and they don’t have pride in their teaching abilities, if they are not confident, and if they are not excited, then the students aren’t gonna be excited…You need to stay organized and on top of your game every single day. Keeping a day-by-day planner with events that are going to happen with due dates and everything like that. If you were to meet with a client, you need to have your pen and paper ready at all times. If you are going to meet with a student, like a professor should, you need to be able to write down their questions and answer them in full detail. (M., male)

Discussion and limitations

The present study is the first in the literature to address the critical question, “How do students envision the ideal advertising professor?” Answering this fundamental question from the students’ perspective is informative to advertising faculty, whose career trajectories and classroom success are influenced by their ability to meet student expectations; to advertising program administrators, who often include meeting student expectations in performance evaluations and hiring choices; and to advertising education researchers, as a basis for further research in advertising pedagogy.

A set of participant-driven, ZMET-based interviews provided rich insights about the cognitive, experiential, motivational, sensory, emotional and interpretive knowledge structures defining students’ perceptions of an ideal advertising professor. Some of the themes that emerged from the interviews were novel, while others affirmed, at a normative level, insights from research on exceptional teachers in other higher education disciplines. To a certain extent, there is a shared understanding of what an ideal college professor should be like, regardless of teaching area. Inasmuch as that universal ideal is concerned, the expectations of advertising students interviewed in this study overlapped with those of students in other higher education disciplines. For example, respondents’ views that an ideal advertising professor should be knowledgeable, enthusiastic, approachable, friendly, etc., are expectations that college students have of exemplary teachers across academic domains; they do not uniquely apply to advertising instructors (e.g., Gall, Gall, and Borg 2003; Gruber, Reppel, and Voss 2010; Sanchez et al. 2011; Singleton-Jackson, Jackson, and Reinhardt 2010). The same can be said about the students’ transactional view of the college experience, whereby advertising professors are seen to a considerable degree as “mercenaries” hired to provide quality higher education services. Research on higher education has long used a customer service-based framework to analyze how universities can meet student demands and ultimately thrive in a competitive environment, with scholars observing that students faced with a myriad of sales pitches from universities worldwide might knowingly or unknowingly hold a customer service-based, transactional view of their education experience (e.g., Joseph, Yakhou, and Stone 2005; Marzo-Navarro, Pedraja-Iglesias, and Rivera-Torres 2005; Voss, Gruber, and Szmigin 2007). Although that literature refers primarily to facets of the student experience beyond academic instruction (such as the location of the university, social activities, costs, campus safety, quality of accommodations, recreational and research facilities, extra-curricular activities, sports teams, nightlife, financial aid, etc.; Joseph, Yakhou, and Stone 2005), our findings show that the transactional mindset has penetrated the academic aspect of learning and interacting with advertising professors, in and outside the classroom. Educational psychology research has shown that once a transactional view colors students’ perception of learning experiences, the intrinsic enjoyment, motivation, and rewards that those experiences can offer in and by themselves are diminished considerably (Deci, Koestner, and Ryan 1999, 2001) and could significantly reduce the joy advertising students would otherwise get from their college experience.

Going further, we will avoid extensively discussing themes that re-affirm previous findings. Readers can easily reference such commentary elsewhere. Instead, we focus on a second category of findings: those that describe in particular, or uniquely, advertising instructors.

The study uncovered detailed and sophisticated perceptions of the ideal advertising professor, encompassing no fewer than 15 conceptual metaphors. For example, the deep metaphor, Multicultural Mind, encompassed expectations of cultural competence associated with understanding and teaching advertising. It reflected an acute realization from students that advertising is a global phenomenon; they expected the knowledge and skills they acquire in advertising courses to prepare them for a global job market. Andrews, Lysonski, and Durvasula (1991) recommended decades ago that advertising educators consider individual country differences, such as differences in the perceived social and economic effects of advertising, when preparing content for international courses. Given our respondents’ global outlook on advertising, this recommendation may equally apply to all advertising professors, whether teaching abroad or in their home country. As noted by Nelson (2021), university students today are a more ethnically and racially diverse generation than ever (Wang 2018) and are “radically inclusive” (Francis and Hoefel 2018). Increasingly diverse and culturally aware student populations require advertising educators to provide culturally sensitive learning experiences that acknowledge and consider differences, shedding the ethnocentric bias that has defined US advertising teaching and research for years (Dunn, 1994). At a minimum, such an exercise could help students understand and operate in markets outside the US (Hachtmann 2014). Whether most advertising instructors or the standard advertising curricula meet these contemporary demands is a question worth asking in future research.

Another metaphor, Mentor/Career Advisor, affirms one of the “joys of being an advertising professor” (Gangadharbatla 2020, 76). That is, having the opportunity to engage students in one-on-one conversation regarding the particularities of advertising, their place in it, and how best to position them for success in a highly competitive and creative industry. Given the vocational nature of advertising, one potential catalyst of success may be ad agency internships. Several students expected that advertising professors would actively facilitate such opportunities. Internships are often part of degree requirements for advertising students, and educators have indicated “strong support” for their inclusion in curricula (Banning and Schweitzer 2007). The students had an acute awareness that the proverbial gap between academia and the advertising industry might manifest itself not only in terms of instructor qualifications (as it is typically discussed in the literature; e.g., Lancaster, Katz, and Cho 1990), but also as a void in their education, and internships were seen as the way to reduce that gap.

Advertising is uniquely understood as a field that encourages creative expression (Wolburg et al. 2011). As a Nurturer of Creative Thought, the ideal advertising professor was expected to facilitate this expression by considering multiple perspectives, valuing originality, engaging in pedagogical innovation, and instilling confidence in students to exercise their creativity. These intuitive expectations on the part of the students describe an approach to teaching that has tremendous pedagogical benefits, empowering them to succeed in and beyond the classroom. As one advertising professor reflected on the importance of helping students grow creatively, “it is my job to identify my students’ creativity…and work alongside them to develop it…I find that as their creative confidence grows, so does their confidence in other areas. They are more willing to take risks. To push for the best solution. To err. To succeed” (Grumbein 2018, 57). This reflection highlights the reciprocal nature of creative learning. Through the practice of encouraging exploration, supporting autonomy, and taking risks at innovative pedagogy, the advertising professor becomes the model for students to embody in their own careers.

Student creativity in the classroom, discussed by the study participants in the sense of “having original and valuable ideas” (Robinson 2011), is widely seen as something that can be taught and nurtured through training (McCorkle et al. 2007; Cheung, Roskams, and Fisher 2006). Several studies have provided concrete strategies for nurturing creativity, including encouraging students to take risks within the classroom and brainstorming a large number of ideas at once (e.g., McCorkle et al. 2007; Ramocki 2014). As students prepare for their roles in the contemporary advertising industry or academia, creativity is also needed to adapt to the digital and technological changes that keep disrupting the ways in which advertising business is conducted. Researchers, practitioners, and educators have exhaustively sought to address technology’s impact on the creative process (Habib 2015; Abdulkarim 2018), and some have adapted to this change (Sheehan and Morrison 2009; Chen et al. 2019). Although our respondents did not articulate yet a desire that contemporary advertising instructors should be able to foster creativity at the intersection between emerging technologies and traditional advertising practice, this will likely change shortly. We see this as another reason to encourage multifaceted talent and expertise in hiring advertising instructors, who may soon need to meet expectations of fluency in that intersectional space.

Among this particular sample of participants, the ideal advertising professor was predominantly imagined as male. This was somewhat surprising given that most participants self-identified as female (9 out of 12), but also understandable since male instructors outnumber female instructors among advertising faculty at the schools where interviews were conducted. One student elaborated on why her ideal advertising professor was not imagined as a woman: “The reason, I think, is because all the professors I have had for advertising or marketing have just been guys, so I think that’s why just pictured that because I haven’t had a woman be a professor for those classes, so it’s like harder for me to envision that based on my experience” (H., female). Another participant perceived the ideal female advertising professor and ideal male advertising professor differently: “I feel like she’d be more eager to help you and like make sure you understand, like get a good grade versus like he’ll just be like, help you understand the concepts but maybe not work with you as hard” (RS, female).

The gendering of the ideal advertising professor and gendered expectations are domains in need of future research. Is the predominance of male advertising instructors a reality across college campuses? If so, would a gender imbalance lead to a gendering of the ideal professor elsewhere, as it did here? Would the ideal advertising professor be construed as female by students at schools where women outnumber men among advertising faculty? How many such institutions exist? Established scholarship in other higher education disciplines found solid evidence that gender bias against women is a pervasive issue in academia (Bachen, McLoughlin, and Garcia 1999; Miller and Chamberlin 2000; Basow, Phelan, and Capotosto 2006; Kogan, Schoenfeld-Tacher, and Hellyer 2010). Is such bias, often expressed in lower peer and student evaluations of female instructors, a problem in our field as well? How does it influence hiring and promotion decisions? Research designed to answer such questions would contribute an academic perspective to accompany studies that explored gendered performance and expectation within advertising agencies, and found pervasive gender bias against women in the advertising industry, manifested as an imbalance in leadership and through the assignment of distinctly feminized labor and roles in agency culture (Alvesson 1998; Grow and Broyles 2011; Fullerton and Kendrick 2017; Mallia 2009, 2014, 2017; Thompson-Whiteside, Turnbull, and Howe-Walsh 2021; Windels, Lee, and Yeh 2010).

Another identity marker was prescribed to the ideal advertising professor: middle age. While to some extent older age was seen as a benefit because it indicates experience, after a point academic seniority carried the stigma of one being removed from “the real world.” As one student remarked: “like early 30s, just someone who has enough time to be in the industry because I feel like it is always changing and like if you are an older professor, you have been out of the industry for a while…if you are younger, you can sometimes kind of keep up with what’s going on; you’ve been in it” (JN, female).

The following profile of the ideal advertising professor emerged: the ideal advertising professor is a seasoned professional, with considerable industry experience and connections, who brings a wealth of practical knowledge to the classroom and exudes high energy and passion. “He” is middle-aged and well-traveled: has lived in or traveled to other countries whose cultures he understands. This experience allows “him” to be open-minded, culturally sensitive, and encouraging of diverse opinions in the classroom. “He” does not necessarily need to have a creative personality, although that is a plus. “He” should foster creativity among students by motivating them to think independently. “He” takes risks and continuously innovates pedagogically by finding new and surprising ways to deliver course content to students who expect “him” to entertain them, guide them with career and life advice, and even counsel them on occasion. “He” is passionate about advertising and engaged in continuous learning. Lastly, the ideal advertising professor is punctual, organized, confident in knowledge and teaching abilities, and acts as a caring leader.

Some of these qualities are echoed in instructor-centered studies. They include greater connection to the industry, creative intelligence and inspiration, an attendance to the specific needs of students, and a commitment that goes beyond the classroom (Banning and Schweitzer 2007; Crawford et al. 2020; Murphy et al. 2001; Reid 1977; Robbs and Broyles 2012; Sandage 1955). Encouragement of creative thinking, cultural competence and significant industry experience were also considered essential characteristics of advertising professors by advertising professionals (Neill and Schauster 2015; Xie, Schauster, and Neill 2018). As more evidence of student perceptions of advertising instructors accumulates over time, research should address how student-centered, instructor-centered, and industry-centered studies compare and diverge from one another.

While recognizing that the findings have direct implications for hiring and offering support to advertising faculty, one of this study’s reviewers rightfully remarked that this “students’ wish list is rather astounding [and]… discouraging for the many job candidates on the job search who cannot live up to those expectations.” We wish to address two issues related to the implications of such a tall order.

First, not only were several expectations of the students unrealistic – such as the desire for young faculty with decades of experience in the industry – but many were rather unattainable, such as those related to gender or personality traits. Age and gender are rather immutable, and personality changes are not easily attainable in professional development spaces (Trammell and Aldrich 2016). We suggest that interested administrators and faculty focus instead on those areas that can be affected, to bring the faculty closer to students’ expectations. Such areas include professional development or facilitating advertising faculty engagement with advertising professionals. For example, expectations of punctuality, classroom management skills, creativity in content delivery, encouraging original ways of thinking, delivering content in novel manners, can be cultivated via pedagogical training and faculty “brown bag” sessions. Training and pedagogical seminars designed to implement and cultivate soft skills can include programs focused on traits such as nurturance, social relatedness, and ingenuity. Continuous development of pedagogical knowledge and skills are particularly needed by faculty in the US, where professors are not required to earn pedagogical certificates or degrees to teach at research universities, as is customary in many other countries. Similarly, expectations of faculty experience with the advertising industry can be met by facilitating continuous engagement of faculty with advertising agencies. On behalf of AEJMC, Crawford et al. (2020) surveyed over 300 media and communication educators to assess their professional development program needs. Connecting with the industry was the second most favored programming behind external grant writing, and multiple educators called for industry involvement in future programming. Of course, many advertising programs, especially those located in close proximity to major media markets, already prioritize faculty engagement with the advertising industry and continuously hire adjunct faculty from local ad agencies. In addition, qualifying individual US-based faculty can apply for competitive, short term industry residencies offered through organizations like the AAA. The present findings suggest that such practices be institutionalized and supported financially on a permanent basis.

This brings us to the second, and most important, insight for faculty and administrators. The findings may appear to implicate the individual professor as the party to heed our insights or strive to embody this ideal. However, it is not the sole responsibility of individual instructors to meet this ideal. Administrators can aim to approach the ideal profile at the collective faculty body level, rather than by seeking individual faculty that have all the strengths expected by students. Specifically, the results of the interviews recommend prioritizing two criteria in forming a body of faculty that collectively deliver on students’ expectations: first, breadth and depth of industry experience, and second, mentoring or advising experience. That said, the emerging recommendations offer actionable, practical guidance to implement change, toward a potential reformulation of new-hire criteria.

Some final thoughts are in order about the limits of generalizing from the present inquiry, and how we attempted to address this shortcoming. Like most qualitative methods, ZMET is not designed to ensure generalizability of results to a larger population or group. Its purpose is exploration and identification of the participants’ deep-seated mental perceptions of a particular topic, which are reflected in the common patterns or themes that emerge from the interviews. The technique can yield high descriptive, interpretive and theoretical validity (see Maxwell 1992), but as most qualitative methods, it lacks external validity. Thus, the identified dimensions of the ideal advertising professor’s profile (expert, guide, entertainer, creative mind and education professional) may, or may not, generalize beyond the sample used in the study.

To address this inherent limitation and further gauge the potential generalizability of the findings to the larger body of advertising students at the two universities, we heeded the useful advice of one of the study’s anonymous reviewers and conducted a quantitative survey with a larger number of participants (N = 203; 105 and 98, respectively from each university), designed to test students’ endorsement of the five main characteristics of the ideal advertising professor that emerged from the ZMET interviews. All survey participants had taken at least one advertising course, and 134 were advertising majors. There was a gender imbalance (141 identified as female, 53 as male, 9 chose the option “other/prefer not to answer”).

After being presented with descriptions of each of the five dimensions, the respondents were asked to indicate on a scale of 0 to10 (not important and all – extremely important), how important it is to them personally that advertising professors have the characteristics embodied by the five types (expert, guide, entertainer, creative mind and education professional). The results were revelatory. The sample of survey respondents strongly endorsed the ideal professor profile that surfaced from the interviews: all dimensions were considered highly important (all five means were between 8 and 9). In descending order of importance, as perceived by the survey respondents: The Expert (M = 8.95, SD = 1.48), The Guide (M = 8.49, SD = 1.69), The Creative Mind (M = 8.41, SD = 1.75), The Education Professional (M = 8.39, SD = 1.70), The Entertainer (M = 8.13, SD = 1.93). The closeness of these means indicate the students did not perceive any one of these features to be significantly more important than the others. The clustering of the means toward the high end of the scale shows that students considered all of them highly important. A series of independent sample t-tests showed no significant differences between students at the two universities for any of these dimensions.

Scores on a follow-up question that asked students to rank order the five dimensions from 1 (lowest score/most important) to 5 (highest score/least important) conveyed a similar pattern: The Expert (Mean rank score = 2.41) came first, followed by The Guide (Mean rank score = 2.85), The Creative Mind (Mean rank score = 2.98), The Education Professional (Mean rank score = 3.08), and The Entertainer (Mean rank score = 3.66).

The survey results enhance the validity of the qualitatively derived profile. The survey also reinforces what Maxwell (1992) called the “internal generalizability” of the ZMET findings, i.e., their generalizability to similar samples – in our case, possibly to advertising students from the same institutions from which the qualitative sample was drawn. Although it seems likely, “external generalizability,” i.e., generalizability to advertising students from other US universities, cannot be claimed. Determining “external generalizability” would require a nationally representative survey. Nevertheless, given that qualitative findings can often help make sense of “similar persons or situations” (Maxwell 1992; Yin 2003), it is likely that advertising students from other US research universities would share somewhat similar views on what constitutes an ideal advertising instructor. This possibility should be investigated in future research.

Additional information

Funding

Open Access funding provided by the Qatar National Library.

Appendix

Collage Examples.