Editorial: emerging trends.(Editorial)

TWO TRENDS are emerging in advertising measurement. Trend one: Especially for packaged goods, data supplied by scanners offer marketers the option of essentially ignoring attitudes and similar personal variables. Instead, we can now go directly from advertising to sales. And maybe demographics serve well enough as "explainers."

The second trend is that other marketers, and particularly media planners, have become acutely aware that they must go beyond demographics in order to understand their customers. This new awareness has been emerging in articles in the Journal of Advertising Research.

The goal of advertising research is to understand and predict the …