Disdaining the cost and complexity of using research to foresee the future, some marketers choose the “Field of Dreams” approach, assuring senior management that “If we build it, they will come.” In fact, one can cite several successes generated with that risk-taking, “Market-Maker” strategy, but we can also list myriad failures. Faster than you can say, “Take the Euro-Tunnel from Canary Wharf to Euro-Disney,” we can come up with a lengthy list of products and services that failed to find ready customer acceptance.

BC: (Bill Cook) Mike, you've been the president of the ARF for 15 years. How has the ARF changed to meet the needs of the industry during that time?

MN: (Mike Naples) The basic mission of the ARF and the way it serves the needs of its members has not really changed, because the ARF is a very unique organization. It's a combination of a research institute that accomplishes research studies, and has paid researchers to do so, and it is also an association of member companies that serves the needs and the interests of its members. There's no other non-profit research organization in the world with quite that unique profile.

As we move into the next millennium, we are already seeing economic and marketing shifts—the move toward supply-dominated economies and the loosening of constraints on commerce across geopolitical boundaries—that are gaining momentum worldwide. These shifts will demand that marketers create and leverage the power of the brand to realize anything more than commodity margins. Failing to do so will force marketers to seek lowest-cost provider status, to compete against other goods or services primarily on price, and to realize no more than commodity margins.

I was delighted to be invited by the editor of the Journal of Advertising Research to contribute my own perspective on the changes surrounding the start of the next millennium for this 60th anniversary commemoration of the Advertising Research Foundation. It is an interesting time that we live in, and my perception is that the times will get even more interesting through the entirety of our lifetimes.

Rather than making the simplistic assumption that research is always passive and merely adapts to change, the reality of media research today is that there is an extreme interdependency between media and research. To illustrate this, I will talk about four different media environments and the evolution of research within those environments. These environments are: the domestic print market, the international print market, the domestic television market, and, finally, the domestic measurement of the World Wide Web.

The conclusion is that if our industry, and we ourselves as researchers, constantly think of research as adapting, we will miss the opportunity to guide our industry away from evolutionary deadends. If, on the other hand, we think of our industry as a complex system, where nothing comes first, there is the opportunity for the development of radically different and potentially efficient marketing systems in the future.

This paper discusses the role of the World Wide Web as an advertising medium and its position in the marketing communication mix. It introduces a conceptual framework for measuring the efficiency of a Web site. Efficiency indexes are defined for five Web advertising communication activities, and an overall measure of Web site efficiency measure is presented.

Control over advertising research budgets and initiatives has continued to shift to the advertiser. This trend will likely continue—as will a growing gap between advertiser and agency in use of quantitative research, favored by the former, and qualitative research, favored by the latter. The potential for barriers to communication and cooperation may lie in this split if efforts aren't undertaken to offset it. Copy Pre–Testing is becoming more integrated with tracking and other research activities, including advertising response modeling, and other means of understanding what is driving advertising success and failure. The testing of new advertising venues—infomercials, the Internet, and kiosks—will grow tremendously in importance as we approach the year 2000.

Over the many decades that public opinion research has mined the American public, we have seen a slow, steady, inexorable decline in response rates. Many published articles have documented this apparently universal trend, some articles have bemoaned it, and no articles have told us how to avoid it.

For many years, we've all been distressed by trends in consumer cooperation with surveys. Whatever the method, we've seen years—perhaps decades—of steady erosion in response rates. Even the goldest of gold standard methods now have to speculate about the effects of nonresponse bias.