Interactive Ad-Ventures: Reflecting on the Past and Exploring Future Horizons for <i>JIA</i>

We offer a retrospective on interactive advertising research by first examining the topics addressed in the Journal of Interactive Advertising (JIA) in three respects: (1) how they align with the journal’s editorial mission, (2) how different they are from adjacent journals and (3) how they mirror key evolutions in advertising practice. We screened the focal research topics of 1380 articles published since 2000 in three journals: Journal of Interactive Advertising, Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, and Journal of Interactive Marketing. Additionally (4) we discuss how publication characteristics in JIA evolved during the last decade, highlighting notable patterns. To that end we screened the 173 articles published in the 10 most recent volumes of the Journal of Interactive Advertising on the following characteristics: Research topics, theoretical lenses, methods (types of samples, countries in which the studies were conducted, research designs and analytical approaches, realism and ecological validity in research designs), and the quality of the managerial implications offered and further research suggestions. Finally, (5) we provide methodological recommendations and an extensive further research agenda for four interactive advertising categories encompassing: A) Innovation and Technology: Real-time hyper-personalization, immersive experiences, personalized search technology, location-based advertising, B) consumer responses: user-generated content, ad avoidance, C) integration strategies: integration of tools and channels, integration across societal groups, and D) ethics and sustainability: consumer data empowerment, and ad carbon footprint and consumer digital impact.