United Internet AG
Northeastern University
The Journal of Interactive Marketing Best Paper Award honors the best Journal of Interactive Marketing article published in a given calendar year. The award is given to an article that has made a significant contribution to the advancement of the practice of marketing. Editorial Board Members, Associate Editors, and Advisory Board Members vote for the best paper in an initial round, and the papers that receive the most votes are considered by a smaller committee that chooses the winner.
The winners of the 2024 award are German Zenetti and Koen Pauwels for their article, “Amplifying Off-Site Purchases with On-Site Retail Media Advertising,” published in the November 2024 issue of Journal of Interactive Marketing. The award committee, composed of Beth Fossen (Indiana University), Charles Hofacker (Florida State University), Arvind Rangaswamy (Penn State University), and Francesca Sotgiu (VU University Amsterdam) stated:
“Consumers increasingly engage in ‘webrooming’ behavior—browsing products online before purchasing in-store—yet the implications of this practice for retailers remain underexplored. This paper provides a comprehensive empirical investigation into the performance effects of webrooming across categories. Using a robust multisource dataset and carefully constructed identification strategy, the authors demonstrate that webrooming drives higher sales performance compared to pure online or offline paths. Importantly, the paper sheds light on how these effects vary across product categories and under different conditions, offering marketers clear, actionable insights into when and how webrooming behavior creates value.
The paper was selected for the 2024 JNM Best Paper Award due to its strong methodological rigor, clear practical contribution, and novel insights into omnichannel marketing. The committee was especially impressed by how convincingly the study established the performance impact of webrooming and by the nuanced analysis of category-level heterogeneity. Together, these elements contribute meaningfully to both academic understanding and managerial decision making in an increasingly hybrid retail environment.”
The article will be recognized at the 2025 AMA Summer Academic Conference.
Honorable Mention
As an honorable mention for this award, the selection committee would like to recognize Fotis Efthymiou, Christian Hildebrand, Emanuel de Bellis, and William H. Hampton for their article, “The Power of AI-Generated Voices: How Digital Vocal Tract Length Shapes Product Congruency and Ad Performance” (Journal of Interactive Marketing, May 2024).
2024 Finalists
The other excellent finalists for the award were:
- “Analyzing Purchase Decisions Using Dynamic Location Data,” by Tal Shoshani, Peter Pal Zubcsek, and Shachar Reichman
- “I Didn’t Win! An Overlooked Downside of Crowdsourcing?,” by Tatiana Karpukhina, Martin Schreier, Chris Janiszewski, and Hidehiko Nishikawa
Go to the Journal of Interactive Marketing