Evaluating how advertising researchers study practitioners

Audience  Media Industry and Consumers 

Although the body of advertising research is wide, some experts worry that it is oversaturated with studies focused on consumer perceptions and behaviors, while studies on advertising professionals are underrepresented. In a new study published online in the Journal of Advertising, College of Journalism and Communications Associate Professor of Advertising Kasey Windels and co-authors Sara Champlin, an associate professor of advertising at the University of North Texas, Sarah Karl, a doctoral student at UF and Xiao Liang, a doctoral student at the University of Miami, set out to identify the gaps left behind by this skew.

“Many studies use a sample of consumers as participants, and they test certain message features or the ways that consumers process messages,” Windels said. “Far fewer studies talk to practitioners. We wanted to get a sense of how we studied practitioners in advertising and to encourage more studies.”

To examine the impacts of focusing on consumer research, Windels and her team conducted an extensive review of over 450 studies from 1964-2024 that each focused on advertising practitioners. Using these studies, they created a model of advertising practitioner scholarship (MAPS). This model sorted studies based on four common factors, societal, industrial/organizational, individual and message, and 20 different characteristics within those factors. They found that among the sampled studies, societal characteristics were most common, followed by industrial/organizational, individual and message.

Sorting these studies into their MAPS highlighted several areas of research that were underexplored. For example, there were surprisingly few studies on laws and regulations, advertising’s impact on society, agency self-promotion and recognition, integrated marketing communications and practitioner ethics.

“We found that practitioner insights about messages and consumers are under examined, and future research should query their perspectives since they are entrenched in creating campaigns,” Windels explained. “I hope this review will encourage more scholars to study practitioners’ perspectives and to seek to understand how agencies and professionals impact the advertising messages we see.”

In addition to identifying gaps in research, Windels and her team also pulled information from other studies on why these gaps may be occurring in the first place. For one, advertising research is very broad, and studies involving advertising practitioners can vary wildly in topic, covering fields like sociology, art, communication, psychology, business and beyond. Sudden and constant changes in advertising also make practitioner’s jobs more complex and harder to study over time, and there is more of a gap between practitioners and researchers than other fields of research.

Although this study is complete, there is still room for further research into the complexities and benefits of studying advertising practitioners. “We are actually working on two studies right now,” Windels said. “One looks at all of the studies that ask professionals about advertising curriculum and education. The other looks at all of the studies that ask practitioners how features of the agency or client can impact advertising creativity or effectiveness.”

Posted: April 7, 2026
Insights Categories: Audience, Media Industry and Consumers
Tagged as: Advertising, Kasey Windels