Professor Demetrios Vakratsas awarded AMA Marketing Communications Group Best Paper Award

Management professor Demetrios Vakratsas's 1999 paper, Vakratsas, D. and Tim Ambler, "How advertising works: What do we really know?" Journal of Marketing 63 (January), 26-43, was selected from a pool of all marketing communications-related papers published in 1999 in the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of International Marketing, and the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing. A team of well-respected scholars and members of the SIG and past award winners voted in the process.

The logic for this lag is that if an article has stood the test of time as a much cited, memorable and significant research effort, it is a testament to its quality.

The selection process was especially competitive this year, as it was expanded from advertising-related articles to a broader definition of the category (the Marketing Communications SIG was formerly the Advertising SIG). This makes the award all the more elite.

Professor Vakratsas and co-author Tim Ambler reviewed 250 journal articles and books to develop a taxonomy of models ranging from market response to integrative and non-hierarchic models plus a framework for what is known and what remains to be researched about how advertising affects consumers.

The award will be presented in February at the American Marketing Association's Winter meeting in San Antonio, Texas.