Where Are All the Critical Voices in Advertising Research?

Abstract: In the last five decades, the field of advertising scholarship has witnessed tremendous growth in research productivity, both in terms of quality and quantity. Much of this is driven by our field’s enthusiastic embrace of quantitative methods and an unwavering focus on administrative research. However, this focus has left little room for other types of inquiries, making our field less inclusive. In this article, we make a case for the addition of critical voices to our field as a way of making it more inclusive. In doing so, our field will expand its scope and focus from a practitioner and industry perspective to include research with implications for other stakeholders, such as consumers, policy makers, activists, and society at large. We also identify some key areas in advertising research that are ripe for a critical examination and conclude with some pedagogical, theoretical, and practical implications.