American Academy of Advertising Honors
On March 26, Stan Richards School of Advertising and Public Relations Professor Wei-Na Lee was officially announced as the 2017 recipient of the American Academy of Advertising’s (AAA) Ivan L. Preston Outstanding Contribution to Research Award at the AAA annual conference in Boston.
“The award is special as it recognizes outstanding sustained and systematic contributions to advertising research,” said Joseph E. Phelps, fellow of the American Academy of Advertising and professor at the University of Alabama. “This contribution to scholarship forms the very core of our scholarly organization.”
Lee’s research primarily examines the role of culture in persuasive communication. She’s authored more than 100 published works on topics such as acculturation, country-of-origin effects, consumer ethnocentrism, cross-cultural communication and consumer behavior, audience response to persuasive messages, and multicultural marketing communication.
Her work has been supported by more than 20 research grants and she is former editor-in-chief of the Journal of Advertising, currently serving as a member of its senior advisory board. Lee is a three-time recipient of the American Academy of Advertising Research Fellowship Award and in 2010, was elected vice president of the AAA and chaired its national conference in Minneapolis, Minn.
She’s held positions as a visiting professor at DDB Needham in Chicago and at D'Arcy Masius Benton and Bowles in New York City. Between 1998 and 2001, she was executive director of the Office of Survey Research at UT Austin, where she implemented a number of technology-assisted research tools for state-of-the-art client services. More recently, in an effort to enhance global communication and cross-cultural awareness, Lee designed and led short-term study abroad courses in countries such as Singapore and Hong Kong SAR, China.
Among other accolades at the AAA conference, students Yuhosua Ryoo, Yongwoog Jeon and Tae Rang Choi won the Best Student Paper Award for their submission, “The Interplay between Visual Metaphor and Verbal Message in Advertising;” Tae Rang Choi, Yongwoog Jeon, Jimi Hong and Soyoung Lee all won research grant awards; and Eunice Kim, former doctoral student and current assistant professor at the University of Florida, won the Mary Alice Shaver Most Promising Professor Award.
