The advertising business is about ideas, creativity, and innovation. It is the DNA of what my former boss Ed Ney called “commercial persuasion.” There is no shortage of ideas, creativity, and innovation but we lack meaningful channels to share and codify innovation. Ideas and creativity sooner or later are on public display. Here is where the Journal of Advertising Research (JAR) comes into perspective.

This is the first and last presidentorial, an editorial statement written not by the editor of the magazine but by the president of the publisher, in this case, The ARF.

Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) was a breakthrough concept when Don Schultz introduced it to marketers in the 1980s. But IMC, which is even more important today as the “marketing mix” has expanded to include many nontraditional activities, has had trouble moving from concept to practical application.

This issue represents my inaugural compilation on behalf of the Journal of Advertising Research (JAR). I want to thank Bob Barocci for encouraging my involvement with the Journal and Joe Plummer for generously offering to share his editorship of it with me. Through its unique focus on persuasive consumer and customer communication and its authoritative yet highly accessible content, the JAR has no doubt introduced or illuminated for many advertisers and researchers, as it has for me, the latest approaches, applications, and debates in the field. With Joe Plummer I look forward to leading the journal toward even greater relevance among what we hope to be an expanded readership of marketing professionals—both practitioners and academics.

This article introduces an Advanced Brand Valuation (ABV) model that combines the psychological strength of a brand in the mind of its consumers with accepted accounting practices to determine the true financial value of a brand. ABV is a modular approach that integrates common marketing research metrics into financial calculations and meets standards for tax and financial reporting purposes. (Sattler, H., S. Högl, and O. Hupp. “Evaluation of the Financial Value of Brands.” In ESOMAR, Excellence in International Research 2003, D. S. Fellows, ed. Amsterdam: ESOMAR, 2002.) This tool can be used for strategic decision-making purposes, such as assessing international expansion opportunities or prioritizing the purchase and/or sale of brands.

This study examines the mixed-media strategy of advertising online and publicizing the web location in magazine advertisements. It also analyzes the extent of integration between websites and print advertisements in six major U.S. magazines. In creating an online commercial site, it is important to recognize that the internet requires different marketing and advertising practices than those used in traditional media. Mixed-media advertising necessitates coordinated efforts between those managing the website and those designing advertisements for other media. The findings suggest that marketers are not exploiting all possible benefits of their websites by not adequately integrating print and online advertising efforts.

In April 2002, when I was honored to be selected as the chairman of the AAAA, I decided that the focus of my tenure would be making a mark on improving the general quality of advertising in America. I defined that as doing something to raise a critical component of advertising quality to a new level.

In this exploratory study of integrated marketing communications (IMC), we bring together relational and transactional data, and sales and marketing views, to investigate whether firms can enhance their position in the market in terms of both marketing-oriented and sales-based performance benchmarks. This article examines, in a business-to-business services context, the relationships between collecting various types of customer transaction and relational data, customer data quality, and two types of business unit performance. The first type of performance is a more traditional sales-oriented metric of sales-oriented business growth, growth in sales, and net income. The second type is a less traditional marketing-oriented metric, called marketing-oriented customer performance, a summed measure of retention rate, share of wallet, lifetime customer value, and return on investment (ROI). An extensive review of different types of transaction and relational data produced two different categories of transaction and relationship information.

Advertising effectiveness tests combining surveys and electronic tracking of online advertising are common, and the method is increasingly being utilized within more comprehensive, cross-media methodologies. The validity of these tests, however, has sometimes been called into question because of the short duration between online advertising exposure and survey taking. Using a unique database containing more than 1,600 online advertising campaigns, we find that there is a measurable but weak relationship between time since last exposure and branding effectiveness, indicating the shortness of duration does not have a substantial impact on the validity of these tests.

The goal of corporate leadership at any publicly traded company is to protect and improve the equity of the company. With this goal in mind, communicators interested in elevating the role of communications and assessing return on investment must begin to speak the language of corporate leadership—increased efficiencies created and equity gained—with respect to their brand-building efforts.

CoreBrand has tapped into its 14-year study and evolving understanding of brand ROI and developed a new measure of brand equity that assesses the exact amount of market capitalization attributable to the corporate brand. These measures change brand-building—and related communication activities such as advertising and public relations—from intuitively positive efforts to an absolute fundamental of business with measurable impact on stock price: replacing all intuition with fact.

Within a short period of just over a decade, IMC has swept around the world and become the accepted norm of businesses and apparently the agencies that service their needs. Here we critically consider IMC in terms of (1) development, (2) impact on marketing communications, (3) barriers to further progress, and (4) current location identification and likely development in the future. Evidently, IMC is here to stay. But there are problems. Not least of these is the apparent reluctance of many businesses to adopt anything more than an inside-out approach to IMC—in other words, bundling promotional mix elements together so they look and sound alike. But, IMC has to move beyond this stage if it is to radically change the face of communications and marketing.

This article is a tribute to Ernest Dichter, whose introduction of motivation research (MR) left a legacy of ideas that shaped advertising practice and study in the twentieth century. His pioneering contributions included turning attention to the consumer, adapting psychoanalytic concepts to research, and using therapy techniques to analyze marketplace behavior.

Today's pretesting is based on concepts of consumer behavior that were devised over a hundred years ago and which were largely discarded in the 1980s. What would it look like if we had known, and then applied what we know now, 25 years ago?

This article documents the approach that Unisys has taken to design, develop, and implement a robust marketing measurement system—the Unisys Marketing Dashboard. On a global scale and a real-time basis, this system is tracking marketing programs and activities, and reporting results to drive operational effectiveness and support major business decisions.

In September 2002, Unisys launched the dashboard initiative. This project is one key phase of an overall Marketing Excellence Architecture initiated by the Unisys chief marketing officer. Throughout 2001 and 2002, the marketing organizational framework was developed and delivered. Today, the Unisys Marketing Dashboard serves as the vehicle for addressing the challenge of marketing accountability via a robust, integrated system that has brought additional validation to the importance of marketing within the corporation.

Once again a “paradigm shift” is about to occur, leaving an accepted and acknowledged academic and social frame of standardization, simplification, and specialization totally perplexed. In the field of advertising, the paradigm change is coming from an offspring called Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC). And, nowhere is that more evident than in the non-English-speaking countries where the primary focus on mass advertising and mass communication is giving way to more integrated forms of communication, including such areas as sales promotion, direct marketing, public relations, events, and the like.

During the last decade, a series of studies have been conducted, either on a country level or sometimes among several nation states investigating the development, diffusion, and acceptance of IMC. In many of those studies, the comparison has been in the development and diffusion of the concept among traditional advertising agencies and/or advertiser companies. Thus, the most recent research on IMC has been mainly focused on its perception by clients and their advertising agencies (1991 and 1993 in United States; 1995 in the United Kingdom; 1998 in New Zealand, United Kingdom, United States, Australia, and India; 1999 to the present in many research studies). In some of those studies, scholars have argued that IMC is nothing new, it is simply a reiteration of what marketing and communication organizations have always done. In others, research has shown that IMC is indeed a new paradigm and can be quite successfully deployed by all types of firms in the new millennium.

Although viral marketing has garnered a great deal of attention in the trade press, almost nothing is known about the motivations, attitudes, and behaviors of the people (those sending the email to others) that constitute the essential component of any such strategy. This article reports the results of three studies that examine consumer responses and motivations to pass along email. Implications for target selection and message creation are discussed for advertising practitioners interested in implementing viral efforts, and suggestions for future research relating to computer-mediated consumer-to-consumer interactions are presented for academic researchers.These studies were sponsored by Planetfeedback.com (www.planetfeedback.com), an internet-based infomediary company based in Cincinnati.An earlier version of this work will appear as a chapter in the forthcoming book, Online Consumer Psychology, C. Haugvedt, K. Macleit, and R. Yalch (eds.).

Although managers have been aware of the significance of Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI) for over a decade, they have been slow to leverage their ability to maximize their ROMI. The purpose of this article is to sketch a framework for optimizing a corporation's ROMI and to highlight the indispensability of ROMI to marketing management. The article suggests a framework to accelerate the adoption of ROMI, and a plan to carry out a pilot ROMI project. The benefits of ROMI are discussed, and barriers to ROMI listed. The authors conclude that ROMI management is a different kind of management.

This article builds a framework for a new approach to copy testing, based on a theoretical model of advertising that brings affective measures to the forefront. It points the way to a complete rethinking of some new and old tools for measuring the effects of advertising and makes specific suggestions for how copy testing should change.

This study investigated determinants of internet users' willingness to pay for online content. A survey of internet users of a clip art website found that they did conduct benefits/costs analysis when evaluating whether to pay for online content. Usage purpose and experience with online purchasing emerged as significant predictors. Further, the study confirmed the existence of “free” mentality among online content users. Managerial implications are explored.

The literature on integrated marketing communication (IMC) in the decade since its introduction offers evidence that debates over the definition, acceptance, leadership, and measurement of IMC remain unresolved. A survey was conducted to investigate leadership preferences and perceptions of appropriate methods of measurement and agency compensation in planning and implementing IMC. The survey was conducted by internet among samples of six professional groups with ties to marketing communication: advertising agency executives, public relations agency executives, corporate marketing executives, corporate public relations executives, advertising and marketing academics, and public relations academics. The survey revealed some clustering of leadership preferences but little movement toward marketing communication measurement and agency compensation methods consistent with models of IMC as a developing paradigm.