Pedagogical Note

Abstract

When I was asked to write an article about the use of teaching cases for this special issue, I wondered why someone outside the advertising field was asked. I set aside my question and quickly said yes to the invitation because I strive to be an evangelist for the case method and above all, I was asked by treasured colleagues. As a start, I decided to review published teaching cases over the last 10 years concerning advertising and related fields in case journals before drawing any conclusions. It was quite revealing and fun to conduct this search, and I found many published cases in the related field of marketing but much fewer advertising cases. Hence, I decided to embark on a more comprehensive online search in textbooks, traditional advertising journals, and case journals. Teaching cases that focus on advertising are commonplace in business textbooks; yet, fewer appear in traditional case journals, and even fewer advertising cases are published in traditional advertising journals. I became curious about trends in advertising teaching cases and decided to survey overall trends in teaching cases related to advertising cases. I reached out to 40 editors, former editors, and members of journal editorial boards for case and discipline-based business journals to ascertain their views on the importance of teaching cases over the last decade and any discernable trends using the format in Table 1. In my online search, I discovered traditional peerreviewed advertising journals focused on manuscripts based on empirical research or pedagogical articles concerning professional and career tips and only a few published teaching cases. However, Table 2 suggests a trend toward greater inclusion of teaching cases in non-case, discipline-based journals over the last decade (see item # 5).