Speculations on the Future of Advertising Research

The last decade has witnessed profound changes in advertising and the profession that supports it. These changes have important implications for research on advertising. This paper discusses the changes in advertising and the implications of these changes for research on advertising. It suggests that future research in advertising must address the following questions: 1) does advertising work, and, if so, when and why; 2) should advertising effects be determined with absolute or relative measures?; 3) how are the media related to advertising response?; 4) how is advertising related to the larger marketing mix of which it is a part?; and 5) how can research support advertising's inherent creative function? While these questions have been the focus of much of the advertising research to date, the paper concludes that the type of research that can answer these questions in the future may be quite different from research in the past in that it will need to focus more on advertising within context than on advertising in isolation from the larger environment of which it is a part.