J. Scott Armstrong

John Scott Armstrong (March 26, 1937 – September 28, 2023 ) was an author, forecasting and marketing expert, and an Emeritus Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Armstrong's research and writing in forecasting promote the ideas that in order to maximize accuracy, forecasting methods should rely on evidence-based methods.

Education and background Armstrong received his B.A. in applied science (1959) and his B.S. in industrial engineering (1960) from Lehigh University. In 1965, he received his M.S. in industrial administration from Carnegie-Mellon University. He received his Ph.D. in management from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 1968. and a founder of the International Journal of Forecasting, and the International Symposium on Forecasting.

Armstrong's work in forecasting promotes the ideas that in order to maximize accuracy, forecasting methods should be conservative (i.e., be consistent with cumulative knowledge of the past), and rely on simple evidence-based methods.

Marketing and advertising Armstrong's book Persuasive Advertising: Evidence-based Principles was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2010. In it, Armstrong presents 194 principles designed to increase the persuasiveness of advertisements. The principles were derived from empirical data, expert opinion, and observation. They are organized and indexed under ten general principles (e.g. emotion, attention), and those ten principles are further grouped into three categories: strategy, general tactics, and media-specific tactics.

In 1989, a University of Maryland study ranked Armstrong among the top 15 marketing professors in the U.S. based on a study using peer ratings, citations, and publications. He serves or has served on editorial positions for the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, the Journal of Business Research, Interfaces, and other journals. He was awarded the Society for Marketing Advances Distinguished Scholar Award for 2000. Regarding government mandated disclaimers, Armstrong argues that they can be ineffective- or even harmful- by encouraging negative behavior, As a result of these findings, he co-created an evidence-based checklist of scientific principles that can be used to evaluate the scientific merit of a given paper. Armstrong wrote that of 17 articles by climatologists, none referred to "the scientific literature on forecasting methods". A group of biologists, whose polar bear research Armstrong disagreed with on that basis, have called Armstrong's applications of business forecasting methods to scientific projections "too ambiguous and subjective to be used as a reliable basis for auditing scientific investigations." Climatologist Kevin Trenberth states that Armstrong's criticisms "overlooked the fact that [the IPCC reports] address many of the things he is critical of."

Armstrong extended a "Global Warming Challenge" to Al Gore in June 2007, in the style of the Simon–Ehrlich wager. Each side was to place $10,000 ($20,000 total) in trust, with the winner being determined by annual mean temperatures. Gore declined the wager, stating that he does not gamble. Climatologist Gavin Schmidt described Armstrong's wager as "essentially a bet on year to year weather noise" rather than climate change.

Armstrong has published articles and testified before Congress on forecasts of polar bear populations, arguing that previous estimates were too flawed to justify listing the bear as an endangered species. In an evaluation of Armstrong and other authors’ criticism of polar bear population forecasts, Amstrup and other authors concluded that all of the claims made by Armstrong were either mistaken or misleading. PollyVote.com, founded 2004. TheClimateBet.com, 2007 challenge to Al Gore. IronLawofRegulation.com, founded 2016.

Awards and honors Received Lifetime Achievement Award in Climate Science from the Heartland Institute (2017) Selected as the inaugural lecturer for the “Armstrong Brilliance in Research in Marketing Award” (Hong Kong 2016) SMA/JAI Press Distinguished Scholar Award for 2000, 2000 Silver Jubilee Lecturer for the 25th Anniversary Celebration of the College of Business at Massey University in New Zealand, 1998 Honorary Fellow for “Distinguished Contributions to Forecasting” by the International Institute of Forecasters (1996) Ranked 15th among U. S. marketing professors based on peer ratings, citations, and publications (Kirkpatrick & Locke 1989 )