Georgia Institute of Technology
University of Florida
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. Because of the journal’s transition to AMA in 2022, there was a delay in processing the award until this year.
The winners of the 2021 award are Timothy J. Halloran and Richard J. Lutz for their article, “Let’s Give Them Something to Talk About: Which Social Media Engagements Predict Purchase Frequency?” (Journal of Interactive Marketing, November 2021). The award committee included Editor Arvind Rangaswamy (Penn State University), Journal of Interactive Marketing Board Member and former Editor Charles Hofacker (Florida State University), and Editorial Board members Yuping Liu-Thompkins (Old Dominion University) and Peter C. Verhoef (University of Groningen). They stated:
As is typically the case with selection of award winners, the finalist papers were all close in terms of their overall merit, even if they differed substantially from the others on specific criteria. Therefore, this was a difficult choice for the committee. The committee met to discuss the finalists and considered several criteria to assess the merits of each finalist, including the novelty of the topic, theoretical foundations, data uniqueness, methods, validity of the results, and current and potential impact (e.g., downloads, cites). Ultimately, we made a unanimous decision about the award winner. What impressed us most about the paper by Halloran and Lutz is that despite so many published papers on the effects of social media in marketing, this is among the very few studies that exploited individual-level data to assess behavioral outcomes associated with social media use by consumers.
The article will be honored at the Summer AMA Academic Conference.
2021 Finalists
The other excellent finalists for the award were:
- Anniek W. Eigenraam, Jiska Eelen, and Peeter W.J. Verlegh, “Let Me Entertain You? The Importance of Authenticity in Online Customer Engagement“
- Mainak Sarkar and Arnaud De Bruyn, “LSTM Response Models for Direct Marketing Analytics: Replacing Feature Engineering with Deep Learning“
- Hamidreza Shahbaznezhad, Rebecca Dolan, and Mona Rashidirad, “The Role of Social Media Content Format and Platform in Users’ Engagement Behavior“
Go to the Journal of Interactive Marketing