What is wrong with advertising research and how can we fix it?

Abstract

Advertising research is an applied discipline. It should use insights and theories from other disciplines to develop actionable recommendations for contemporary advertising practice, by explaining in a valid way how and why advertising works. I discuss some observations that indicate that part of the current academic advertising literature falls short of this expectation, using information in 330 articles that were published in the International Journal of Advertising (200) and the Journal of Advertising (130) in the period 2016–2019: Lack of realism, no or very little practical relevance, analytical stunt work to study relatively trivial topics, sloppy sampling methods, a lack of novel methods, hardly any research on real behavior, very little qualitative research, relatively little ‘integration’, and the obsessions and prejudices of the academic bubble. I also provide suggestions to improve academic advertising research, such as changing the gatekeeper role and habits of editors and reviewers, adapting guidelines for authors, fundamentally altering the review process, for instance by means of preregistration of studies, and changing the criteria to hire and evaluate advertising researchers and professors.