Advertising Industry Research Articles

Is There an App for That? Assessing the Quality and Content of Apps for Asthma Management Available In Canada

Abstract BACKGROUND: Asthma is the most common chronic respiratory disease in Canada, with highest prevalence in children 5-17 years of age. The use of effective apps for asthma management for children and adolescents may decrease the significant morbidity of this disease. A wide range of apps designed to assist in the home management of asthma are available online. However, there are no published data assessing the quality and content of asthma apps for children and families in Canada. OBJECTIVES: To evaluate apps targeted at children or parents for the active management of asthma based on quality, accuracy of content and presence of advertising. DESIGN/METHODS: The iOS and Google Play stores were searched using the key terms “asthma”, “reactive airways”, “puffer”, and “wheeze”. Apps that were available in English or French, were interactive, were targeted at children or their families, and addressed the medical management of asthma were included. Apps were examined using a detailed data collection tool to assess usability and content. Quality criteria was based on a published, validated tool. Content was evaluated based on the Canadian Thoracic Society asthma guidelines. RESULTS: A total of 95 apps were screened, and 11 met the inclusion criteria. Average app quality score was 3.65 (range 2.63 – 4.38) out of 5. One app used 7 out of 7 CTS criteria in assessing asthma control, one used 6, six used 5, and three used 4. 10 out of 11 apps had the capacity to track symptoms, which was linked to level of asthma control based on CTS/CPS criteria. 8 out of 11 apps had the capacity to record medication doses in a journal format and provided daily medication reminders. 6 apps had the capacity to create and save a personalized asthma action plan. All apps used medications available in Canada. The most functional app based on these criteria was asthmamd, followed by AsthmaSense. One app was funded but a pharmaceutical company and had industry logo, but no significant brand bias. No other apps had specific industry advertising. None were specifically designed for use by children or adolescents. CONCLUSION: 11 relatively high-quality apps are available for asthma management for Canadian families. Of these apps, the ones that best match quality, adherence to CTS guidelines, and lack of marketing/branding are asthmamd and AsthmaSense. There exists a gap to create apps that are specifically targeted at children and adolescents with high functionality for managing asthma.

Mad women: gendered divisions in the Swedish advertising industry, 1930–2012

This article constitutes a first attempt to systematically map the presence of women in the greatly changing Swedish advertising industry since 1930. The overarching aim of the study is to analyse how the gendered divisions of labour and business changed in relation to both business structure and the overall labour market in Sweden. While we conclude that women constituted around 40–50% of the workforce over time, we see an increase in the shares of women in higher positions and in women who were self-employed and managers. This upturn, however, stabilised during the 1990s. We argue that the changes in gendered divisions of labour and business coincided with a fast-changing business structure. First, the old cartel broke down in the mid-1960s. Then, the number of firms increased quickly during the 1970s and 1980s, and the market share for the largest firms declined. This, in turn, meant new business opportunities for women at the same time as their overall labour market participation increased. The article stresses the importance of both acknowledging women’s presence in the industry development as well as the structures constituting gender divisions.

Comparison of generic advertising for a competitive industry to a monopolist

This paper compares competitive output and generic (or check-off) advertising of the type commonly facilitated in agriculture to the levels of output and advertising under monopoly with the same industry cost structure and consumer preferences using the complementary preference approach developed by Becker and Murphy and others. Advertising is assumed to be seller-determined in the case of monopoly or by an industry advertising planner in the case of competition. The marginal benefit function of advertising in the case of competition is much different than for a monopolist with the same industry cost structure. Although of similar mathematical form in equilibrium, the resulting behavior and intuition are different, and neither achieves a social optimum. Conditions under which monopoly output and advertising are greater than under competition with generic advertising are derived.

Selling Under the Swastika: Advertising and Commercial Culture in Nazi Germany by Pamela E. Swett

Reviewed by: Selling Under the Swastika: Advertising and Commercial Culture in Nazi Germany by Pamela E. Swett Anne Berg Selling Under the Swastika: Advertising and Commercial Culture in Nazi Germany. By Pamela E. Swett. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. Pp. xii + 344. Cloth $65.00. ISBN: 978-0804773553. Nazi Propaganda reiterated and disseminated grandiose political visions but was hardly able to insinuate such visions into the many mindless chores and simple pleasures that characterized everyday life in the Third Reich. Advertisements for the laundry detergent Persil, Nivea skin cream, Osram light bulbs, and many other brand products, however, accomplished just that. In this important book, Pamela Swett examines the “bounded relative autonomy” of corporations and the complex relationships between the commercial sector, consumers, and the regime (2). Rather than focusing on the negotiations between bureaucrats and commercial agents alone, she demonstrates that consumers were fully engaged in the market—all in preparation for the “new order” that the National Socialist regime promised and actively began to forge (2). Spanning the period from the late 1920s to the early 1950s, the book makes visible important continuities between the commercial culture of the 1930s and the economic miracle of the 1950s. When it comes to advertising, the real break, Swett suggests, occurred in 1943 as the regime put a moratorium on new advertisements. The subsequent dearth of both ads and goods enabled memories that decoupled consumer products from the politics of Nazism and extended the ubiquitous Persilschein (denazification certificate) to even the most popular laundry detergent manufacturer Persil as a surrogate for the commercial sector more generally. After a brief overview of the advertisement industry during the late Weimar years that highlights the industry’s tenuous reputation and excessive self-doubt of its staff, Swett demonstrates that National Socialism facilitated the advertisement industry’s ability to cast itself in a more positive light in part because propaganda, with which advertisements had often been conflated, attained a more positive connotation, at least officially. Although the Ad Council (Werberat) “relied on Goebbels patronage, it was a nongovernmental body that existed outside of the Reich’s Chamber of Culture” and therefore its members, both business leaders and party officials, enjoyed a modicum of independence (56–57). Swett scrutinizes commercial culture as it took shape in the 1930s, assessing the industry’s ability to tap into pervading consumer trends while articulating National Socialist priorities at the same time. The staffs responsible for advertising and sales were crucial here, particularly because their “self-professed aims,” as Swett convincingly argues, evidenced striking, and perhaps surprising, [End Page 409] continuities between the Weimar and Nazi periods (91). In fact it seems as though the Nazi regime unfettered German advertisement from its previous strictures and facilitated a more “scientific” approach to advertisement, pushing German advertising into the realm of market research in 1935. Ad men and sales staff nonetheless remained outsiders in Nazi Germany, sub-professionals who were seen as “dishonest in commercial dealings” and always in danger of resembling “Jewish peddlers from an earlier era who were considered racial pariahs” (161). Trying to represent their company and its racial credentials, traveling sales staff, Swett argues, played a crucial role in commercial life; and their purportedly apolitical dealings helped cement the Volksgemeinschaft through routine interactions between sales staff, retailers, and consumers (161). Swett is thus able to demonstrate that German firms—who generally designed advertisements for their products in house—took great care to listen to, learn about, and directly address their customers (139). Following Peter Fritzsche’s Life and Death in the Third Reich (2008), Michael Wildt’s Volksgemeinschaft als Selbstermächtigung (2007), Andrew Bergerson’s Ordinary Germans in Extraordinary Times (2004) and others, Swett brings into view a society in which individual consumers, companies, and their staff as well as local collectives not only wrested liminal agency from the regime but actively articulated visions for their communities and the nation—in other words, a society where people not only made do with Nazism but keenly shaped it. Instead of merely being enthralled by fascist spectacle, seduced by power, or bought with trifles stolen from the East, Swett demonstrates that Germans developed their loyalty to the regime through...

Challenging Stereotypes: A Semiotic Analysis of Indian Advertisements

India has become one of the biggest economies of the world with more consumers and purchasing power, and its advertisement industry too has grown and evolved with it. Advertising is controlled by its market interests; is often accused of stereotyping and avoidance of controversial subjects, but it also reflects the popular culture and society through its language and visuals. The signs of change in urban India of the 21st century are visible in the advertising industry also, as some brands are making conscious efforts to break stereotypes and move away from trodden paths. The paper looks at the concept of stereotyping of gender roles and representation of minorities from a critical perspective through discourse analysis of selected Indian television advertisements telecast countrywide and uploaded on YouTube Ad Leaderboards. It analyses ads that conform to stereotyping as well as ones that attempt to challenge it through their portrayal of unconventional and extraordinary people and stories. The study highlights changes among the urban middle class due to financial independence of women and the influence of internet, showing how advertising that caters to them has reflected these changes.

The Digital Highway Carrot: A Study of E-Business in India with Solace and Strength

India's digital vision was first laid in the 1980s with pioneering steps for creating the National Informatics Centre (NIC). The NIC was the beginning of an effort to computerise government and digital base India for the twenty-first century. Another organisation such as C-DOT digitised India's networks and the number of phones has increased from 5 million to 1 billion. Further, the creation of the National Knowledge Network (NKN) is a high-bandwidth network to connect all educational institutions in the country to enable high end research and collaboration. Another internet access for the rural population is the National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN) aimed to provide high-speed broadband connectivity to 250, 000 panchayats in the country. Another service is UID (unique identification) platform with facial, finger prints and iris scan. UID platform once connected to mobile phones, bank accounts and others will help deliver benefits of digital India to all residents. Digital India lies in the development of the digital ecosystem in terms of apps and app-based government services as well as free and equal access to all these for consumers across the country. The government has been focusing different ongoing projects such as NOFN, NKN, National e-Governance Plan and many more. According to FICCI-KPMG Indian Media and Entertainment Industry Report 2015, digital advertising industry grew from Rs 3, 010 crore in 2013 to Rs 4, 350 crore in 2014 growth around 45%. State Bank of India (SBI) has its own digital baby in the name of SBI rewards. Axis bank behind with its Pingpay, ICICI bank has launched ‘all new mobile banking app’; HDFC bank with its launch of Payzapp is almost replicating a Flipkart or Paytm.

PROCESS OF GOVERNANCE IN ADVERTISEMENT REGULATION IN THE UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

United Arab Emirates has grown in great leaps as a country which can claim very high achievements in different sectors of economy such as real estate, education, banking, retail, trading, telecommunications, airline and tourism, as well as in many other spheres. Complementing these developments, is a large of advertisement activities which are aimed at attracting and retaining customers who are very diverse in nature. The advertisement industry hence is booming as the competition between companies is getting more and more aggressive. It is safe to conclude that with so many advertisements, competing for the attention of the young Emirati population as well as the working expat community, there is significant pressure on advertisement agencies to make their advertisements more captivating. This may be leading to an exaggeration of values that the organization can give through their products and services, and may use language that may become just more memorable than accurate (Al Tamimi, 2013). As in the other countries, there is self-regulation for advertising in UAE, but there is also complex set of regulations that incorporate different laws. This paper is an attempt to explore the methods and processes adopted by advertising agencies or organizations that create advertisements, to ensure compliance with these laws. The study used interviews with officials of advertising agency and government organisations which control advertisements, such as the ministry of information and municipality sections dealing with advertisements, to understand the processes and methods of ensuring governance in advertising. The study adds value to the existing knowledge of advertisement governance and gives insights into the UAE perspective.

"Oh yeah, they're looking": A thematic analysis of indoor UV tanning industry advertising and articles.

Skin cancers are becoming more prevalent even though many can be prevented. Women are more knowledgeable than men about skin cancer, yet they are more likely to sunbathe deliberately and to use artificial tanning equipment. The purpose of this article is to examine messages that women receive about the benefits of a tan. Particularly, we focused on how the indoor UV tanning industry represents the value of a tan to women. We subjected five issues of Smart Tan Canada to thematic analysis. We examined language in advertisements and articles that promote an artificial tan to women. Four themes emerged: Be Beautiful and Sexy; Look Young; Feel Better; and Science, Health, and Nature. These themes are especially effective in a culture that routinely objectifies women and places a high degree of value on their appearance. We suggest that appearance-based interventions, media literacy training, and legislation could counteract the messages in the themes.

The Question of “Female Gaze”:

This paper problematizes the issue of an “active female gaze” as opposed to the passive one determined by the dominant ideological system that produces an “active male gaze” in narratives of cinema and advertisements. In mainstream cinema as well as the advertisement industry, usually the story is rendered from an essentially male perspective, regardless of the narrator’s being male or female. It is so even when the subject matter is related to issues that directly concern women like the repression of their desires or Lesbianism, for instance. Using some of the key ideas propounded by British film critic Laura Mulvey, the paper examines some of the texts from both cinema and the advertisement industry to find out the complex mechanism of the “male gaze.” It also attempts to explore the possibility of a “female gaze” that might, if achieved, give new dimensions to both forms of entertainment.

Improving classification performance through selective instance completion

In multiple domains, actively acquiring missing input information at a reasonable cost in order to improve our understanding of the input---output relationships is of increasing importance. This problem has gained prominence in healthcare, public policy making, education, and in the targeted advertising industry which tries to best match people to products. In this paper we tackle an important variant of this problem: Instance completion, where we want to choose the best k incomplete instances to query from a much larger universe of N ($$\gg $$?k) incomplete instances so as to learn the most accurate classifier. We propose a principled framework which motivates a generally applicable yet efficient meta-technique for choosing k such instances. Since we cannot know a priori the classifier that will result from the completed dataset, i.e. the final classifier, our method chooses the k instances based on a derived upper bound on the expectation of the distance between the next classifier and the final classifier. We additionally derive a sufficient condition for these two solutions to match. We then empirically evaluate the performance of our method relative to the state-of-the-art methods on four UCI datasets as well as three proprietary e-commerce datasets used in previous studies. In these experiments, we also demonstrate how close we are likely to be to the optimal solution, by quantifying the extent to which our sufficient condition is satisfied. Lastly, we show that our method is easily extensible to the setting where we have a non-uniform cost associated with acquiring the missing information.

Advertisement clicking prediction by using multiple criteria mathematical programming

In online advertisement industry, it is important to predict potentially profitable users who will click target ads (i.e., Behavioral targeting). The task selects the potential users that are likely to click the ads by analyzing user's clicking/web browsing information and displaying the most relevant ads to them. This paper proposes four multiple criteria mathematical programming models for advertisement clicking problems. First two are multi-criteria linear regression (MCLR) and kernel-based multiple criteria regression (KMCR) algorithms for click-through rate (CTR) prediction. The second two are multi-criteria linear programming (MCLP) and kernel-based multiple criteria programming (KMCP) algorithms, which are used to predict ads clicking events, such as identifying clicked ads in a set of ads. Using the experimental datasets from KDD Cup 2012, the paper first conducts a comparison of the proposed MCLR and KMCR with the methods of support vector regression (SVR) and logistic regression (LR), which shows that both MCLR and KMCR are good alternatives. Then the paper further studies the performance between the proposed MCLP and KMCP algorithms with known algorithms, including support vector machines (SVM), LR, radial basis function network (RBFN), k-nearest neighbor algorithm (KNN) and Naive Bayes (NB) in both prediction and selection processes. The studies show that the MCLP and KMCP models have better performance stability and can be used to effectively handle behavioral targeting application for online advertisement problems.

Top Level Results of a Study of Czech Households' Awareness of the Food Advertising Industry's Self-Regulation Related to Children

This paper is primarily focused on analyses of the research undertaken to understand the awareness of food advertising’s self-regulation authority (Council for Advertising) and of the Czech Code of Conduct in the context of the growing issue of child obesity. The objective is to find out the perception of food advertising to children and awareness of regulation and industry self-regulation amongst Czech mothers. Our theoretical framework presumes dependence between the awareness levels and selected demographic variables. We conclude several actions to overcome low awareness of the Council of Advertising and its Code of Conduct and to transfer the industry’s self-regulation into an efficient and recognized tool of shaping the culture of responsible advertising in the Czech Republic. The conclusions lead towards stronger protection of children.

3-D cinema: immersive media technology

3-D cinema is a largely overlooked media within geographical critique. This omission is notable given both the sustained academic consideration afforded to other popular media, the medium’s significant commercial and popular success, and its status as an ‘affective’ and captivating storytelling medium. With reference to film industry advertisements, the experiential dimensions of the 3-D cinematic encounter and its (popular) framing as an ‘immersive’ consumer experience are explored. In particular, the notion of ‘immersion’ is unpacked with reference to the medium’s engineering and production techniques. In so doing, the intertwinement of the industrial desire for ever more ‘immersive’ and ‘realistic’ consumer experience is explored in relation to the engineering techniques exhibiting perceptual mimicry, or what could be termed ‘mimetic engineering’. The association between 3-D cinema and ‘tactile’ images is then explored with reference to geographic literatures on ‘haptics’ and technologies of touch. A number of recent ‘innovations’ in these fields are drawn upon in order to complicate 3-D cinema’s association with ‘tactility’. In so doing, a technological shift towards the increasingly pervasive and sophisticated engagement of the wider multi-sensory palette is explored. Drawing upon recent media technology ‘innovations’, this persistent and relentless desire for ever more ‘immersive’ and perceptually-convincing media technology is explored in light of developing media geographies.

‘Take Amtrak to Black History’: marketing heritage tourism to African Americans in the 1970s

This analysis provides a critical reading of travel industry advertisements that appeared in Ebony magazine in the 1970s and identifies the causes of the African-American travel boom of the early 1970s: increasing prosperity of the black middle class, market segmentation in the travel industry and burgeoning popular interest in social and cultural history. It argues that travel industry advertisements aimed at African Americans, which emphasised travel as a crucial step in mending the social and cultural fissures racism left between African Americans in the USA and the rest of the nation and world, attempted to address African-American interests in heritage and heritage travel as agents for social change. African Americans responded to industry interest in their travel needs in diverse ways, sometimes criticising the travel industry’s oversimplification of heritage travel, other times embracing travel as a method of using historical knowledge for self-empowerment. This study points to the need for further historical analysis of African-American tourism and its role in confronting de facto segregation and racism in the late Cold War era and in building an increasingly globalised leisure economy.

Adolescent Former Cigarette Smokers’ Vulnerability to Other Tobacco Products

This study examined the psychosocial risk characteristics of former smokers in comparison to nonsmokers, experimental smokers, and established smokers. Adolescents reported their tobacco use beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors via the Virginia Youth Tobacco Survey in 2007 (N = 2,067) and 2009 (N = 3,928). Multinomial logistic regression results showed former smokers had greater susceptibility to tobacco-related influences (peer smoking, industry advertising) and alternative tobacco use (smokeless tobacco, waterpipe/hookah) than nonsmokers and early experimenters and fewer psychosocial differences compared to advanced experimenters and established smokers. Findings highlight the need for addressing adolescents who are former smokers as a distinct group in prevention and cessation efforts. Implications and limitations are noted.

Advertising, the Media, and Globalization

Advertising is a crucial media industry, not only in its own right but also because of the intermediary structural relation it holds between the commercial media on one hand and the consumer goods and service industries on the other. This can be conceived as a manufacturing-marketing- media complex. However, the traditional business model that facilitated this relationship in the mass media era is now under challenge from the new forms of social communication afforded by the internet. Accordingly, such a fundamental transformation forces a critical review of how advertising has been understood. This essay explains how former approaches such as the semiological analysis of advertisements, the Marxist political economy of value, ethnographic studies of advertising practice, and the “ cultural turn ” in social theory have all been superseded to a greater or lesser extent by the reorientation of advertising within a broader conceptual landscape of consumer culture, and by contemporary theory and research on branding. Furthermore, attention is given to the historical globalization of the corporations that own the brands and the advertisi ng industry’s response, which has been to consolidate into a small number of global umbrella corporations that coordinate and manage a host of specialist divisions across the whole field of “ integrated marketing communications. ”

Exploring the potential for a mass media campaign to influence support for a ban on tobacco promotion at the point of sale.

This study explores whether exposure to advertisements that focus on the negative effects of tobacco industry advertising and promotion at the point of sale (anti-POS advertising) influence: (i) attitude toward POS advertising; (ii) perceived impact of POS advertising on youth smoking; and (iii) support for a ban on tobacco promotion at the POS among adult non-smokers in New York. Data are from a split-sample, experimental study, using an online media tracking survey with embedded TV, radio and print advertising. Exposure to anti-POS advertising was associated with higher odds of holding a negative attitude toward POS advertising (OR 2.43, P < 0.001) and support for a ban on tobacco promotion at the POS (OR 1.77, P < 0.05), but not with perceived impact of POS tobacco advertisements on youth smoking. Findings suggest the possibility that a mass media campaign could be used to influence public attitude toward POS advertising and support for a ban on tobacco promotion at the POS.

Estrategias ante la nueva situación tecnológica y económica del sector publicitario español

El sector publicitario está viviendo grandes cambios que afectan a prácticamente todos los ámbitos de actividad y a todos los sujetos implicados. Con esta investigación pretendemos conocer la influencia que la crisis económica y la evolución tecnológica está teniendo en estas transformaciones y en las decisiones estratégicas que se ponen en marcha en el sector. Utilizando como herramienta metodológica la encuesta, se entrevista a más de 60 profesionales y académicos expertos en publicidad y en comunicaciones de marketing. De las respuestas de los encuestados podemos concluir que si bien la influencia de la crisis y de la tecnología es notable, no lo es con la misma intensidad en todas las variables analizadas.

Downturn times in the Arab Advertising Industry: Strategies of Survival

Downturn times in the Arab Advertising Industry: Strategies of Survival

Marketing Responsible Drinking Effectively to Young Adults

The primary goal of this research is to identify and examine the components of responsible drinking advertisements. We will examine industry and government related advertisements as we try to understand one of our major questions: does the source influence the validity of the message? The next group of major questions that we will be looking to answer is how are the vague quantifiers used in responsible drinking campaigns interpreted by the public? How many drinks do people consider “too much?” What does “drink responsibly” really mean? The third major question is whether or not an individual’s current consumption patterns of alcohol have any effect on how individuals assess responsible drinking campaigns. Our qualitative research has indicated that social influences can be strongly related with drinking patterns; this will be further examined in our quantitative research. Also, we will be looking into some of the psychology behind industry and government sponsored advertisements as well as gathering and interpreting information from a sample of our target demographic. Our target demographic consists of both male and females between the ages 18-24. Our literature review and qualitative analysis gave us good insight into some of the potential answers to our questions. We will use these potential answers from our previous research to guide us as we attempt to conduct conclusive research based on a sample data of 169 individuals. Our findings will aid us in developing conclusions and recommendations for Alberta Health Services.