Browsing by Subject "Advertising"

Now showing 1 - 9 of 9
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    Brand journalism: a cultural history of consumers, citizens, and community in Ford Times.
    (2012-04) Swenson, Rebecca Dean
    Advertising and public relations professionals have recently applied the term `brand journalism' to their work and praised it as a new model for strategic communication. This dissertation develops the concept by illustrating that brand journalism is not brand new; journalism has long served as a model for corporate communicators, especially for editors of the company press. To illustrate historical and theoretical tension inherent in brand journalism, this research tells the story of Ford Times, a company magazine created by the Ford Motor Company from 1908 to 1917 and from 1943 to 1993 for consumers and dealers. Ford Times mission was to present a "view of America through the windshield." As the chapters ahead illustrate, the magazine detailed more than new models for sale; it combined narratives about automobile use, travel, nationhood, history, land conservation, regionalism, food and family with the Ford brand in order to build a reader community that inspired interest and loyalty for most of the twentieth century. By analyzing historical archival material, including Ford Times content, editorial memos, and letters from readers, this study examines the role of a particular company magazine in constructing social space and building brand tenets, and in turn, examines the Ford Times contribution to conversations about community, patriotism, consumption, and the history of public relations. In doing so, this dissertation offers a unique, focused look at the corporate press, a longstanding public relations tactic often overlooked by strategic communication historians.
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    Data supporting: Automated Object Detection in Mobile Eye-Tracking Research: Comparing Manual Coding with Tag Detection, Shape Detection, Matching, and Machine Learning
    (2024-06-20) Segijn, Claire M.; Menheer, Pernu; Lee, Garim; Kim, Eunah; Olsen, David; Hofelich Mohr, Alicia; segijn@umn.edu; Segijn, Claire
    The goal of the current study is to compare the different methods for automated object detection (i.e., tag detection, shape detection, matching, and machine learning) with manual coding on different types of objects (i.e., static, dynamic, and dynamic with human interaction) and describe the advantages and limitations of each method. We tested the methods in an experiment that utilizes mobile eye tracking because of the importance of attention in communication science and the challenges this type of data poses to analyze different objects because visual parameters are consistently changing within and between participants. Python scripts, processed videos, R scripts, and processed data files are included for each method.
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    Essays in pharmaceutical economics.
    (2010-04) Snider, Julia Thornton
    This dissertation is composed of three essays that which examine firms' decisions in developing and marketing prescription drugs and government's role in regulating that process. In the first essay, I look at two forms of promoting prescription drugs and how they interact. Because prescription drugs are chosen by the physician but consumed by the patient, firms have two potential targets for advertising. Advertising to doctors, called "detailing," has historically been more common, but in recent years direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising has risen in prevalence. The question of how these two types of advertising interact is important for understanding the implications of controversial policies such as the bans on DTC advertising found in most countries. This essay develops an identification strategy exploiting policy differences between the United States and Canada to estimate a model of the joint effects of DTC advertising and detailing. I find a significant complementary effect between the two types: All else equal, for every additional dollar spent on DTC advertising, firms spend eight additional cents on detailing. This implies that DTC advertising bans decrease the effectiveness of detailing, and firms will do less as a result. In the second essay, I examine how advertising can have significant effects on the composition of drug usage between branded and generic drugs. Because generic drugs provide a lower-cost means of delivering drug treatment, such compositional effects are relevant to policymakers facing limited health care budgets. In particular, I focus on the effect of DTC advertising and detailing around the time of patent expiration. I create a model with two firms, one branded and one generic, to capture firms' DTC advertising and detailing decisions over the life of a drug. I compare the model's predictions under different regulations on price and advertising with data from the US and Canada. The model's results are consistent with the empirical observations that detailing and DTC advertising are complementary strategies and that optimal detailing and DTC advertising are lower in an environment where lower prices are set by regulators. In addition, numerical results demonstrate that when consumers are reluctant to switch between the branded drug and the generic, the branded firm may choose to engage in a preemptive advertising campaign prior to patent expiration to limit market share grab by the entering generic or even to delay generic entry. This finding helps explain similar preemptive DTC advertising and detailing campaigns observed in the data. Finally, in the third essay, I analyze the way in which governments optimally balance providing broad access to prescription drugs with creating incentives for innovation. Access and innovation are conflicting goals for price-regulating governments because a low price maximizes access but creates little incentive for innovation. To examine this issue, I model pharmaceutical price regulation as the result of a game between the governments of two countries of varying (economic) size. The agents of the game are a multinational pharmaceutical firm which produces a drug for the global market and the two national governments, each of which is assumed to maximize the welfare of the consumers residing within its borders. Prices are determined as a subgame perfect Nash equilibrium. Observing the two national prices, the firm then undertakes costly innovation to attain a drug quality level which is homogenous across the global market. My model produces the result that dividing the world's population into countries creates a free rider problem in which the public good of pharmaceutical innovation is underfunded. Moreover, whenever one of the two countries is considerably larger than the other, the unique Nash equilibrium is for the smaller country to set its drug price to marginal cost. This suggests that a large economy, such as the United States, will end up providing incentives for drug innovation all over the world.
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    Essays on market dynamics, regulation and advertising.
    (2009-06) Qi, Shi
    This dissertation is a collection of three essays that deal with a number of different topics in Industrial Organization. Mainly, they are concerned with market dynamics, regulation policies and advertising. Chapter 1 develops and estimates a dynamic oligopoly model of advertising in the cigarette industry. With this estimated model, I evaluate the impact of the 1971 TV/Radio advertising ban on the cigarette industry. A puzzling fact about this ban is that, while industry advertising spending decreased sharply immediately following its passage, spending then recovered and actually exceeded its pre-ban level within five years. While simple static models cannot account for such a turn of events, the rich dynamic model developed in this paper can. This chapter exploits new previously confidential micro data, now made public through tobacco litigation. In addition, the chapter uses a new concept of Oblivious Equilibrium to handle intractable state space and accelerate equilibrium computation. Chapter 2 studies how advertising influences firms' incentives to invest in R&D. The link between advertising and industry innovation is important, not only because advertising can spur R&D by spreading product knowledge, but also because advertising can discourage new innovative firms from entering the industry. This chapter finds that a worse advertising technology can result in local improvements in industry innovation rates. Globally, however, a complete ban on advertising always reduces industry growth. This result is significant because industry advertising spending is quantitatively significant and there are potential connections between public policy towards advertising and R&D. In chapter 3, we study the performance of the New-Deal sugar manufacturing cartel that existed from 1934 to 1974. We show that the cartel led to major distortions in both how sugar produced at a given factory, and in where the industry was located. The setup of this legal cartel involved four important provisions: sale quotas, land restriction, side payments, and government negotiated factory-farm contracts. We argue that all four provisions distorted how sugar was produced and led to significant loss in productivity measured by sugar recovery rate. Furthermore, we present extensive evidence from industry, company and factory records to support these conclusions.
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    The eye of the beholder: affective and attentional outcomes of selective attention to advertising .
    (2009-11) Duff, Brittany Rebecca-Leigh
    Advertisers often assume that ads that are encountered but not explicitly processed either have no effect, or a positive effect due to mere exposure. However, recent research in visual neuroscience has shown that when a non-target object is exposed, it can lead to negative rather than positive affective ratings for that object. Two studies reported here show that the difference in outcome may depend on one's goal at time of ad exposure. When engaged in exploratory search, a mere exposure effect is obtained. Conversely, goal-driven attention causes ad devaluation. Outcomes in terms of affective evaluation as well as future attention for the exposed ads are tested. Effects of exposure are also found for individual differences in attentional control. Additionally, implications for current advertising avoidance models are discussed.
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    Prescription drug brand Web sites: Guidance where none exists
    (University of Minnesota, College of Pharmacy, 2010) Glinert, Lewis
    This paper applies insights from linguistics and discourse analysis to prescription drug brand Web sites, with special reference to the 100 top-selling drugs. Such sites give the outward appearance of being a place to go for straightforward information about a specific brand. In reality, they present a confused mix of brand information, health information and hype, muddled organization, and poor indication of authority, creating an imbalance between benefit and risk content. In so doing, they breach the letter and spirit of the regulations governing direct-to-consumer advertising, which the FDA has by default applied to such Web sites but which were not designed for this special type of discourse. The many communicative difficulties proven to be caused by Web sites in general, in particular for the elderly and less literate, also pose ethical problems. A rethinking of the verbal and visual design of these drug sites is needed -- and new regulatory guidance, for which this paper offers recommendations. At stake is not just the quality of health information at brand drug sites but also their credibility.
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    The Rise of AI-powered Search Engines: Implications for Online Search Behavior and Search Advertising
    (2024-05) Garlough-Shah, Gabriel
    The emergence of AI-powered search engines (AIPSEs) present enormous opportunities and challenges for the future of research on search engine behavior and advertising alike. To address these opportunities and challenges, a multimethod study (survey and online observation) was conducted examining relationships surrounding perceptions of different technological affordances offered by AIPSEs and traditional search engines (TSEs), motivations for using each type of SE, behavioral intentions to use each in the future, and actual use behavior. Survey results show that participants perceive the technological affordances of AIPSEs and TSEs to be distinct in several facets, finding AIPSEs to be more cool, social, and responsive while finding that TSEs provide more variety and are easier to navigate. Online search observation results showed heavier reliance on TSEs than AIPSEs, more elaborative keyword use on AIPSEs, and heightened use of AIPSEs in advice-seeking circumstances, among other findings. These results offer both theoretical and practical implications.
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    The Role of parental mediation in children’s consumer socialization on the Web.
    (2010-07) Shin, Wonsun
    Using consumer socialization as a theoretical framework, this study investigated the nature and the role of parental mediation in children's responses to and interactions with online advertising. Specifically, it aimed at (1) determining antecedents of parental mediation; (2) examining parent-child co-orientation to different forms of parental mediation; and (3) exploring the relationship between parental mediation and children's attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors related to online advertising. Surveys conducted with children aged 9-12 and their parents/primary caregivers in South Korea revealed that (1) parenting styles and family communication patterns were closely associated with parental mediation; (2) parent-child dyads did not highly agree on any types of parental mediation; and (3) parental mediation and consumer socialization outcomes in the online advertising context were weakly associated. Implications of findings and suggestions for future research were discussed.