ABSTRACT

The relationship between academia and practice is a perennial topic in the academic advertising and marketing literatures. The common notion is that there is a wide gap between the domains of academia and practice, even though their subject matter is the same: advertising and marketing phenomena (Nyilasy & Reid, 2007). In this chapter, we discuss the relationship between theory and practice in advertising, focusing specifically on advertising practitioners’ theories of advertising and offer an empirically based explanation for the academician-practitioner gap in advertising: practitioners’ knowledge autonomy. We locate our discussion in the broader meta-theoretical context of theory and practice and the literature of professionalization. In the framework of McGuire’s (1969) amended persuasion/communication matrix (see Figure 1.1), our discussion lies closest to the territory of “Advertising Organizations”; however, as it has to do with academic and practitioner ideas about how advertising works, studying practitioner thinking has implications for all areas of the model in Figure 1.1. While we will argue that the gap is wider in the field of advertising than in other, more professionalized occupations (such as medicine, law, religion), it is important to acknowledge at the outset that the gap between theory and practice is a general phenomenon and not specific to advertising. We begin by considering the broader general phenomenon before proceeding to the discussion of advertising.