The advertising business is about ideas, creativity, and innovation. It is the DNA of what my former boss Ed Ney called “commercial persuasion.” There is no shortage of ideas, creativity, and innovation but we lack meaningful channels to share and codify innovation. Ideas and creativity sooner or later are on public display. Here is where the Journal of Advertising Research (JAR) comes into perspective.

The JAR has the potential to be a platform for sharing innovation—new concepts, theories, insights, models, and tools. Innovation on how strong brands are built; innovation in reaching prospects; innovation in ways of uncovering needs, wants, and perceptions; innovations in understanding commercial persuasion connections; innovations in media or channel planning; innovation in accountability and models of how commercial persuasion works. In short, the JAR can become the “R&D Lab” for our business. But only if we share what we are discovering. A challenge in such a competitive industry where a new propriety innovation can be a critical component in the next new business win or marketing success story.

If we don't share, however, we won't advance as a profession. We will remain a collection of private guilds passing knowledge to each new generation of apprentices by word of mouth and mentoring. Modern medicine has found ways to share as have scientists from many fields.

The JAR will continue to encourage academic scientists focused on commercial persuasion who innovate, break new ground in research, and wish to share with practitioners. But the JAR will only increase in value as the “R&D Lab” if practitioners also share innovation and new research knowledge.

At the beginning of my career three decades ago at Leo Burnett, I worked with Bill Wells to develop a new methodology to learn more about consumers than their demographic characteristics. We called this new approach “Life Style” research. I was worried about sharing our new learning with others as were some of our senior management. Bill and my Ph.D. advisor urged me to publish. To my astonishment, it wasn't until Bill Wells joined Needham in Chicago eight years later that another advertising agency conducted a “Life Style” study after I published my article “Life Style of the Bank Card User” in the Journal of Marketing in 1970. So please share. We need you to share, and we will help protect confidences and proprietary intellectual capital.

The plan for the Journal of Advertising Research is that by facilitating sharing by academics and industry practitioners, we have developed a new strategy beginning with this issue of JAR focused on a topic of broad interest: “Accountability.” Together with ARF (Advertising Research Foundation) leadership we have generated the following list of topics for the next JAR issues.

This advanced look at the topic or subject area for sharing, we hope, will encourage many of you to submit your innovation for publication (and get it to us electronically or by traditional post). A short abstract will suffice in order for us to determine publication potential quickly and give you fast feedback about developing a fuller article for peer review.

Speaking of peer review, we have invited more practitioners from marketers, agencies, media, and research companies to our JAR editorial review board. These new members will expand our review board and complement our already strong group of academic reviewers created by the previous JAR editors.

Finally, we have a new strategy for expanding contributors to JAR and expanding our readership. Starting with this issue focused on accountability, we invited a small number of innovators to share their thinking and research with the rest of us. One of the invitations went outside the United States to Europe—to Oliver Hupp of GfK and to Kenneth Powaga for their interesting work on brand valuation. Another invitation went to Jim Gregory who leads CoreBrand, a company in the growing discipline of corporate identity and branding. Jim's work in the accountability area of advertising's impact on shareholder value is clearly innovative, but increasingly important to client management.

More about the strategy for expanding readership in the next issue, which will focus on Interactive.

Please join this new phase of our journey at the JAR to make it a channel for sharing innovation in our field of “commercial persuasion.” Let me know your thoughts on our new direction and strategies. Most importantly please share your innovations so we can all do just a bit better in our work.