Warc journals make advertisers smarter

This year's Cannes Lions festival was a bonanza of prize giving for the advertising industry's best work – some of which is featured on Warc. But it's not just the end product of a campaign that deserves recognition of quality; good ads are crafted from a raw material of hard thinking and fresh research. Warc provides a great deal of that raw material through its website, not least in the content of the three journals we publish. And this year all three have been endorsed by Thomson Reuters' Impact Factor: one of the leading indicators of the quality of a publication's output.

An Impact Factor is essentially an average of how often each of a publication's articles are being cited in new academic research. A good score is a sign to academics, practitioners and researchers that their hard work will get read, and used.

The International Journal of Advertising (IJA, published for the Advertising Association) has done especially well, jumping to 2.3, from 0.8 in 2008; the Journal of Advertising Research (JAR, for the Advertising Research Foundation) has risen to 1.8, from 0.6 in 2008 and the International Journal of Market Research (IJMR, for the Market Research Society) has also improved. Content in Warc journals is being read and used widely.

It is pieces such as 'Real Women on Real Beauty: perceptions of Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty' in IJA, 'The Power of a Like: How Brands Reach Fans through Social-Media Marketing' in JAR and 'Personal aspirations and the consumption of luxury goods' in IJMR have been most popular on Warc, and are being used by experts to make advertising smarter.

So everyone can have a good look at the content Warc publishes, we've made the articles linked to in this blogpost free to read.

If you want to know more about our journals, you can also check them out in the Warc Store.