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

Abstract

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.