Home • Wharton Future of Advertising Program

Research Priorities

Creativity and Story
How are the roles, role definitions, and collaborations expanding and impacting effectiveness? Read more…

Technology & Media Drivers
Who are the innovators, where are technologies heading, and how will they impact the “advertising” landscape? Read more…

Global Insights
What can we learn from innovations, experiences, and trends outside of our home countries? Read more…

Orchestration and Talent
How can advertisers bridge the silos of the many touchpoints required for the delivery of effective advertising? Read more…

Advertising Effectiveness
Confronted with swarms and swarms of data, how do we know which numbers matter? What should be tracked, what should be measured, where do the real answer lie? Read more…

WFoA Events
WFoA News

May 16, 2013
Innovative Approaches to Measuring Advertising Effectiveness
The Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative and the SEI Center's Future of Advertising Program
Jon M. Huntsman Hall

May 24-25, 2013
Wharton Global Alumni Forum: Tokyo
Wharton's Global Alumni Forums
Tokyo, Japan

June 2013
Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity
WFoA/Cannes Lions
Cannes, France

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5th Annual WIRED Business Conference, THINK BIGGER! - From our friends at WIRED and MDC Partners, THINK BIGGER! was a great event with incredible speakers and guests from an eclectic mix of tech, fashion, and media heavyweights. Click here to view some of the speakers such as Clive Thompson (WIRED), Marissa Mayer (Yahoo!), and Evan Williams (Twitter).
The End of Traditional Ad Agencies - By John Winsor and Jerry Wind Originally posted on the Harvard Business Review Blog Much like newspapers, conventional advertising agencies are becoming irrelevant. When one person with a wireless connection can be an agency, a media company, or even a manufacturer, traditional advertising organizations have to change their culture, processes, structure, talent policies, [...]
Great Advertising Is Both Local and Global - by Jerry Wind, Stan Sthanunathan and Rob Malcolm Originally posted on the Harvard Business Review Blog Network. With increasing heterogeneity in every market and global exposure just one tweet away, all brands, even local ones, must begin to think globally or suffer the consequences. In 2008, Fiat used Richard Gere as a spokesman [...]
The End of the Ad Campaign As We Know It - A fascinating thing happened at the Super Bowl this year. Typically Super Bowl advertisers meticulously plan every aspect of their presence months in advance of the big game. But this time, Coca-Cola, Audi, and Oreo didn’t just limit themselves to pre-packaged creative.
3rd Annual Wharton Future of Advertising Super Bowl Tweet Meet - The Wharton Future of Advertising Program held our 3rd Annual Super Bowl Tweet Meet on February 3, 2013 featuring experts and pundits invited by host Catharine Hays, Executive Director of WFoA, and Scott Goodson, CEO of cultural movement agency StrawberryFrog and WFoA GAB member. The Super Bowl is to Madison Avenue as [...]

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- Funding Sponsors
Selected Ad2020 Quotes
The media planner’s skill is all about using a number of media to try to intercept customers at various points along their journey from not buying anything particular to purchasing something specific.Hamish PringlePartnerPringle and Pringle LLp
Technologies will continue to change and evolve – driven by the speed of imagination and new enablement….But another thing that we can pretty well count on is that human beings won’t change much over the next 20 years.Ralph OlivaExecutive Director Institute for the Study of Business Markets
The future isn’t social. Consumers are shifting from interacting with other people, through applications, to interacting directly with applications. This trend will accelerate as consumers become embedded in an “Internet of things”.Thomas NovakProfessor of MarketingUCR Sloan Center for Internet Retailing
The more virtual and ‘data informed’ the world becomes relationships between people, and between people and brands will become progressively more gyroscopic. Put simply our world will alter its focus by sensing the muti- dimensional state of ‘place’ – physical, temporal, behavioral and emotional.Rob NormanGlobal Chief Digital OfficerGroupM
In a convergent world, it is impossible to keep things separate, or to control the way that a consumer interacts with a company. Everything is transparent.Nigel MorrisCEOAegis Media Americas and EMEA
I would like to see basic packaged goods type of consumer insight research partnered with an innovative, technological product development team to map out possibilities for the advertising future.Wonya LucasPresident & CEOTV One
Influence is the main objective of advertising. However-many act as if exposure is the essence. In my opinion,the new media misses the opportunity to upgrade to a far better influence.Yoram LevanonChairman and FounderExaudios
Web 3.0 is usually defined as the semantic web… The idea presupposes a common network where data can be shared across apps, enterprises and communities.Karsten KoedManaging Partner and ChairmanGorm Larsen Zornig
People love to be included in what you’re doing and they like it when you do what you say you’re going to do. Do that. (repeat often)Khayyam WakilCIOImmersive Media
The philosophy of selling without selling consists of offering supremely relevant content in a very individual way to those consumers who have decided to consume your company’s content.Steven Van BelleghemAdvisor, Author, ProfessorVlerick Business School
Increasing choice for people means decreasing control for advertisers.Zachary TreuhaftManaging DirectorVML
The first is that we need to focus on understanding people’s reactions to ads.Mike ShawVPcomScore, Inc.
Brands can be praised or pounded in social media and you need to be increasingly part of the conversation.Joel RubinsonPresidentRubinson Partners, Inc.
To paraphrase a famous output of the industry, advertising should be for people, by people. In 2020, this will be even more important.Guy ChampnissCreative Media StrategistMeltwater Consulting
Bottom line, consumers want to feel more in control – a basic human desire – and have a meaningful relationship with the brand.Lisa ColantuonoAAR Partners and Co-FounderAccess Confidential
Retaining female creatives will result in more ads that please or delight women and fewer offensive ones that incite twitter bombing, angry petitions and expensive cancelling of campaigns or spokespeople.Amy CrossEditorVitamin W
Respect for the viewers being so valuable for brands, it could lay the foundations of a sustainable and meaningful approach to advertising in the future.Timothy DuquesneScreenwriter, Consultant
The future could lie in us breaking the tyranny of the big idea and embracing small.Gareth KayChief Strategy OfficerGoodby Silverstein & Partners
The Relationship Era is about authenticity, trust, and relationships, and a purpose helps facilitate these goals. One of its paradoxical discoveries is that companies who care about something beyond selling their products actually do sell more of their products.Doug LevyCEOMEplusYOU
The goal in this era of preference marketing is about building audience trust. This is a conundrum for advertisers and ad agencies, because people generally don’t trust advertising. They like it. They talk about it at the water cooler. They email their friends links to great ads. They’re entertained by those ads. But they don’t trust them.John MillerPresident & FounderScribewise
With a 7.6 billion target market to talk to and much more efficient ways to do it, brands must choose what they say and do with care, creativity and intelligence. For those who do, the reward will be limitless.Isabelle QuevillyHead of Digitalventurethree
Mindsets are the “genetic expressions” that reflect and govern our attitudes, preferences, and behaviors towards everything in our lives. We have tens of thousands of them, each one specific to a company, category, product, and brand. Every one of us has tens of thousands of them, each one specific and discoverable.Steve Rappaport and Howard Moskowitz
To prepare for a future of mobile everywhere in 2020, the advertising community needs to focus immediately on, 1) Proving that mobile is an effective platform for video advertising, and 2) Innovating and improving upon the right advertising technologies to make mobile ad experiences better for consumers.Nikao YangSVP of New Business Development & MarketingAdColony
The “ad agency” of today must therefore become the “Marketing Maestro” of the future- leading the vast communications industry as curators of best of class ideas and their implementation.Hayes RothChief Marketing OfficerLandor
The fact that the activities of billions of people in the web can be monitored by these artificial intelligence engines allow to develop the advertising field into a new historical phase – into a new behavioral science.Noam Lemelstrich LatarFounding DeanSammy Ofer School of Communications at IDC Herzliya

Research Priorities

Funding Sponsors

Selected Ad2020 Quotes