Observations

This article is a commentary on the theme of the 2012 ICORIA Conference held in Stockholm, which was about ‘The changing role of advertising’. We propose that the role of advertising has not changed. The role of advertising has always been, and will continue to be, to sell more of the branded product or service or to achieve a higher price that consumers are willing to pay than would obtain in the absence of advertising. What has changed in recent years is the notable worsening of the academic–practitioner divide, which has seen academic advertising researchers pursuing increasingly unrealistic laboratory studies, textbook writers continuing to ignore practitioners’ research appearing in trade publications and practitioner-oriented journals, and practitioners peeling off into high-sounding but meaningless jargon. Also evident is the tendency to regard the new electronic media as requiring a new model of how advertising communicates and persuades, which, as the authors’ textbooks explain, is sheer nonsense and contrary to the goal of integrated marketing. We provide in this article a translation of practitioners’ jargon into more scientifically acceptable terminology as well as a classification of the new advertising formats in terms of traditional analogs with main stream media advertising.