This issue represents my inaugural compilation on behalf of the Journal of Advertising Research (JAR). I want to thank Bob Barocci for encouraging my involvement with the Journal and Joe Plummer for generously offering to share his editorship of it with me. Through its unique focus on persuasive consumer and customer communication and its authoritative yet highly accessible content, the JAR has no doubt introduced or illuminated for many advertisers and researchers, as it has for me, the latest approaches, applications, and debates in the field. With Joe Plummer I look forward to leading the journal toward even greater relevance among what we hope to be an expanded readership of marketing professionals—both practitioners and academics.

“Greater relevance” requires a number of things. Surely the journal must continue to embody the distinguished qualities enumerated above: a unique focus, authoritativeness, and accessibility. Beyond this, though, it must successfully address the diversity of our readers' roles (advertiser/marketer, agency, media, research firm, academic, student), business models (e.g., profit versus nonprofit, product versus service), and geographic scopes. And, no less importantly, it must “bridge” the study and practice of marketing. Our strategy for doing this has three core elements:

• Begin each issue with an authoritative overview of the major issues, considerations, and debates relating to the theme of the issue. Ideally, this would be composed by a distinguished expert in that field and would “invite in” the vast majority of our readership by providing a sound framework for interpreting, integrating, and remembering the content of the individual studies that follow. Our goal is to begin incorporating such an overview during 2005.
• Seek articles with broad reach. Each individual article should be relevant to more than one major segment of the JAR's readership, and the overall portfolio of articles provided in each issue ideally should “reach” the vast majority of the total readership.
• Ensure that every article is (1) objective, solidly grounded, and soundly argued; (2) expansive in scope and “leading edge” wherever possible; and (3) always specific, practical, and “ready-for-use” by an expert or a generalist. Linking these three criteria provides the “bridge” between study and practice that I mentioned earlier. Our vision is that every article will either enable its readers to take an important, new action or provide them with a new, deeper, clearer mental model for assessing and taking future action.

When the historical core benefits of the JAR are combined with increased relevance and immediacy of usefulness, closing the gap between “greater relevance” and “increased readership” becomes, we believe, just a matter of time. We will know that we have succeeded in broadening our readership when Chief Marketing Officers and their counterparts in the agency, media, and research worlds are writing spirited letters or emails to the co-editors and citing the JAR in their presentations and speeches.

Obviously, the success of our three strategies depends heavily on the choice of topics for each issue. In his editorial to the last issue, “Accountability: Models, Metrics, and New Approaches,” Joe Plummer introduced the idea of featuring one major topic per issue. Our conviction is that, as long as the topic we choose is widely viewed as important or urgent and is multifaceted enough to support productive exploration by our readers from a number of different perspectives, a clear focus on a single, robust topic enhances dramatically the relevance of each issue to our readers. While we will often include one or two articles that extend beyond the topic of the issue but are either exceptionally timely and/or of significant general interest (for instance, in the current issue, Tim Ambler and E. Ann Hollier's article redefining and making the case for “waste” or “extravagance” in advertising), most of the articles in a given issue will emphasize the main topic.

The previous issue of the JAR announced a lineup of worthy topics for the following two years—topics that frame many of the great discussions in marketing communications today. In order to address these themes with the most thought-provoking and useful content possible, we have adjusted the order of their appearance as shown below.

If you have authored a recent article that has not yet been published and that addresses one of these subjects in a way consistent with our strategies outlined above, we would greatly value having the opportunity to consider it for publication in the appropriate issue of the JAR.

This is an exciting time for me to assume the role of co-editor for the Journal: a time in which the burgeoning of possibilities for persuasive customer communication is matched by unprecedented discovery and learning about how consumers process and respond to such communication. Our mission is, through focused, authoritative, and thought-provoking content, to bring together these two streams and help you, the reader, apply the result to your enterprise—whatever its business model and whatever your role in it. I look forward to serving the readers of the JAR.