After a few tangents in past issues, this editorial returns to the contents of just this issue. There is a lot of good stuff here. Much of the content of this issue centers on three crucial questions in advertising: not all of them are about advertising itself.

Many marketing scholars and practitioners would agree that the ideal relationship between a client and its advertising agency is that of a strategic partnership. Yet, one element of the strategic marketing planning process—the setting of the advertising budget—still remains relatively uninfluenced by agency input. In this article, we discuss why agencies traditionally have had little input into the budget-setting process. We draw upon qualitative interviews with top marketing managers to provide insight into the agency/client relationship and identify seven factors likely to influence the extent of agency participation in budget setting. Ways in which clients and agencies can work together to increase agency participation are also discussed.The authors acknowledge the support of the Florida International University Foundation in the completion of this project.

The relationship between advertising agencies and their clients has been the subject of some research, including studies conceptualizing it from an agency theory perspective. The increasingly important relationship between sports (or art) properties and their sponsors, on the other hand, while recognized as crucial for the long-term success of the sponsorship agreement, has remained shrouded in mystery, with little or no research aiming to establish and understand the antecedent of sponsorship renewal. This article reports on an exploratory dyadic study examining the effects of market orientation, trust, and commitment on the principal's willingness to renew the sponsorship relationship. The leading sponsorship property in Australia, the Australian Football League (AFL), and its major sponsors provided the empirical context for this study.

Advertisers who perceived high similarity between themselves and those within their advertising agency rated their agency as superior to those who felt they had less in common with agency contacts. Outcome measures examined included communication, performance, intention to remain with the agency, and defection following the departure of agency personnel. Differences based on the organizational level of the respondent emerged. Lifestyle factors of similarity were found to play an important role in perceived agency performance, lending support for deeper exploration of client traits and personality prior to the agency's assignment of personnel to a client account.The authors would like to thank Anthony King for his help with background research for this article.

The ecological fallacy, the drawing of inferences about individuals based on aggregate level data, was discovered over 50 years ago but is still present in a surprising number of commonly employed marketing and advertising research tools. In this article, we examine three specific manifestations of the ecological fallacy—gap/grid analysis, leverage analysis, and the misuse of indexes from syndicated research. Our analysis will demonstrate that the approaches represent parallel paths to an analysis procedure that results in correct conclusions only by accident.We acknowledge Kathryn Britney for contributions to an earlier draft of this article.

Billions of dollars are spent in advertising for social change yet much of it is reported to be ineffective because of a lack of insight into the target audience. We illustrate the value of target insight in guiding advertising for social change with a focus on road rage, the always rude and often dangerous expression of anger on the highway. We add to the limited research in the field a new body of data about people who are prone to road rage. Target insight suggests a strategy for advertising to reduce road rage including who to talk to, what to say, and where, when, and how to say it.

Children's opinion of advertising and their general skepticism toward it is of the utmost importance to both practitioners and those responsible for advertising control. In this article, the authors detail the development and validation of a scale measuring 8- to 12-year-olds' global attitude toward TV advertising. This scale has been built and validated in a French-speaking context following all the steps required by the classical Churchill (1979) paradigm.The authors are indebted to Richard Lutz at the University of Florida for insightful comments on an earlier version of this article.

This study examined effects of structural and perceptual variables on attitude toward websites. Data were collected from 311 consumers who reviewed four hotel websites. The sites were structurally different in terms of having high versus low number of features and also in terms of informational versus transformational creative strategies. Involvement and perceived interactivity were the two perceptual variables examined in the study. Involvement with the subject of a site and the subdimension of perceived interactivity that measured level of engagement were the best predictors of attitude. Positive attitudes were also associated with sites that took advantage of web-specific features such as virtual tours and online reservations systems. A key implication of this study is the need for advertisers and researchers to reconsider advertising in the context of the web. Radio and television required advertisers to adjust to the new concepts of buying and selling time instead of space and of incorporating aural and visual appeals in messages. The web demands that advertisers adjust to a new medium that is not bound by either space or time and that has the technical capability to involve and engage the consumer.This study was funded in part by grants from the University of Tennessee Scholarly Activities Research Initiative Fund (SARIF) and the Department of Advertising and College of Communication at the University of Tennessee.

This study investigates the impact of content and design elements on the click-through rates of banner advertisements using data from 8,725 real banner advertisements. It is one of the first empirical studies to examine banner advertising effectiveness (measured by click-through rates) and also one of the first to examine the differences between business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) banner advertisements.The authors acknowledge the financial and data support of Michael Moore and Marianna Dizik in the conduct of this study.

Content elements examined include the use of incentives and emotional appeals. Design elements examined include the use of interactivity, color, and animation. Results suggest that content and design elements do not work the same way for B2B and B2C banner advertisements.

In the March 2003 issue of the Journal of Advertising Research, Marvin Goldberg suggests that correlations found in his study correspond with findings of other studies and, hence, suggest a causal relationship between exposure to cigarette advertising (as well as promotional items and American movies) and the smoking-related behaviors of Hong Kong adolescents. In an earlier comment, Robert Reitter pointed out that the study provides no evidence of causality. We point out additional methodological flaws including inappropriate reclassification of data, the need to consider potential sources of bias, and lack of internal consistency of reported data. Additionally, the design of the study does not allow for a test of the proposed theories. We note that the study cites only literature that supports the author's views on the effects of cigarette advertising. The weight of the evidence from the academic literature suggests that (1) advertising does not play a significant role in smoking initiation; (2) advertising does not increase primary demand for cigarettes; and (3) advertising bans do not appear to reduce demand for cigarettes in mature markets.

Expanded consideration of a variety of concepts and methods, from associative learning to econometrics, lends further support to the accumulated consensus that tobacco advertising plays a role, with other factors, in inducing young people to smoke. A point by point rebuttal of issues raised by both Reitter (JAR 43, 1 [2003]: 12–13) and Taylor and Bonner (this issue) makes the case that tobacco advertising is not an exception to the rule: advertising works and it works in part by building primary demand. On a broader, more paradigmatic note, the role of correlation and causation are discussed within a convergence or triangulation framework.

3D Issue-Students and Observations.