Visual pollution: advertising, signage and environmental quality

Book review - Visual pollution: advertising, signage and environmental quality, by Adriana Portella, Farnham, Ashgate, 2014, 316 pp., £70 (hardback).

Health insurance competition in Germany – the role of advertising

In the 1990s, competition among public health insurance funds (‘sickness funds’) was introduced in Germany. As one means of competition, free choice of initial health funds and subsequent switching between them was made available to all insured. Since then, the number of funds has decreased substantially, and funds have had to engage in competitive strategies to remain in the market. In this paper, we want to analyse the funds' advertising activities in the face of the changed competitive environment. This has not been possible to date due to a lack of data. We use two new datasets to get a first insight into the potential effects of competition on funds' advertising strategies; one of the volume and cost of advertisements and one of their contents. Our results suggest that competition has been associated with an increase in the amount of advertising. As to the adverts themselves, we find that there was a decrease in the share of advertisements of a ‘general’ content in favour of advertisements of a more ‘fund-specific’ content. The data therefore indicate that once the market was open to switching of funds by the insured, funds' advertising efforts changed to differentiating their own perceived strengths from those of competitor funds. These observations allow us to draw some tentative conclusions about the relevance of (attempts of) risk selection by health funds via advertisements and about the general success of the pro-competitive legislation.

Red Time is Me-Time: Advertising, Ambivalence, and Women's Magazines

This study explores the concept of self for women in consumer culture, as it is played out in an experiential advertising campaign for a U.K. women's magazine called Red. The study qualitatively explores the tensions and ambivalences experienced by female participants in response to a campaign using the notion of self-indulgence and "me time" as they experience it in the context of their everyday lives. It shows how women attempt to reconcile the mixed emotions that the Red campaign evokes in them.

I Can't Believe It's Not Bakhtin!: Literary Theory, Postmodern Advertising and the Gender Agenda

Taking the literary theories of Mikhail Bakhtin as a starting point, the authors offer three gendered readings of a postmodern advertisement for Moët & Chandon champagne. They commence with a discussion of the influence of gender on textual interpretation; continue with an outline of Bakhtin's key concepts, with particular reference to gender; present three contrasting readings of Moët's postmodern advertisement; and conclude with a discussion of their interpretations together with some reflexive reflections on the gender agenda. Though not claiming to offer a comprehensive introduction to Bakhtin, they do try to exemplify, in a quasi-carnivalesque mode of exposition, something of the character of that supremely gifted thinker and to demonstrate the insights his concepts provide in relation to gendered readings of advertising texts.

Non-conventional advertising formats in television versus spots: An analysis based on the generated recall

Advertising investment and audience figures indicate that television continues to lead as a mass advertising medium. However, its effectiveness is questioned due to problems such as zapping, saturation and audience fragmentation. This has favoured the development of non-conventional advertising formats. This study provides empirical evidence for the theoretical development. This investigation analyzes the recall generated by four non-conventional advertising formats in a real environment: short programme (branded content), television sponsorship, internal and external telepromotion versus the more conventional spot. The methodology employed has integrated secondary data with primary data from computer assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) were performed ad-hoc on a sample of 2000 individuals, aged 16 to 65, representative of the total television audience. Our findings show that non-conventional advertising formats are more effective at a cognitive level, as they generate higher levels of both unaided and aided recall, in all analyzed formats when compared to the spot.

Advertising Colonial Romance and Imperial Masculinity: The Promotion of Philip Meadows Taylor's Novels in Britain

The comments of Charles Kegan Paul, the Victorian publisher who was involved in publishing the novels of the nineteenth-century British-Indian author Philip Meadows Taylor as single volume reprints in the 1880s, are illuminating. They are indicative of the publisher's position with regard to publishing - that there was often no correlation between commercial success and the artistic merit of a work. According to Kegan Paul, a substandard or mediocre text would be commercially successful as long it met a perceived want on the part of the public. In effect, the ruminations of the publisher suggests that a firm desirous of acquiring commercial success for a work should be an astute judge of the pre-existing wants of consumers within the market. Yet Theodor Adorno, writing in the mid-twentieth century, offers an entirely distinctive perspective to Kegan Paul's observations, arguing that there is nothing foreordained about consumer demand for certain cultural tropes or productions. They in fact are driven by an industry that preempts and conditions the possible reactions of the consumer. Both Kegan Paul's and Adorno's insights are illuminating when it comes to addressing the key issues explored in this essay. Kegan Paul's comments allude to the ways in which the publisher's promotion of Philip Meadows Taylor's fictional depictions of India and its peoples were to a large extent driven in the mid- to late-nineteenth century by their expectations of what metropolitan readers desired at any given time, whereas Adorno's insights reveal the ways in which British-Indian narratives and the public identity of their authors were not assured in advance, but were, to a large extent, engineered by the publishing industry and the literary marketplace.

Trademark Licensing in Keyword Advertising

This article examines the use of trademarks as keywords in sponsored links campaigns - in particular the impact of such usage on consumer confusion. It is thus important to highlight that there are a number of reasons why a consumer uses search engines. For example, it may be that a consumer searches for a type of product or service that appeals to them; the consumer may engage in comparison-shopping; or the consumer may already know the specific brand that he or she intends to purchase. Secondly, this article explores the possibility of infringement on other functions of trademarks in the case of the double-identity rule. Thirdly, the article discusses the negative aspects of broadening the concept of taking advantage and isolates this concept from the possibilities of confusion, detriment to the distinctive character, or the reputation of the trademark. Lastly, the article proposes possible remedies to the current situation – in particular the introduction of licensing models for the use of trademarks in keyword advertising and the application of the law on comparative advertising regarding the way the licensee uses those trademarks.

The Influence of Informational and Emotional Advertising Appeals on Advertising Effectiveness – Consumers’ Perspective on the Over-the-Counter Product Advertisements in Finland

Consumers face enormous amounts of promotional messages daily whereas the pharmaceutical companies among other industries spend considerable time and money developing effective advertising strategies. There are multiple possible ways to appeal the target customer in order to increase the effectiveness of the advertisement. In spite of the various possibilities to categorize persuasive communication, the informational and the emotional appeals are the typical approaches. This study assesses the influence of the informational and emotional advertising appeals on the advertising effectiveness in the context of OTCs in Finland. The research method applied in this study is a quantitative survey. The data consists of 461 responses from the target population of 18–80 years old Finnish speaking consumers. The results from the marketing research indicate that the positive correlations of the emotional appeals are much stronger than the positive correlations of the informational appeals relating to the advertising effectiveness. However, on average the Finnish consumers experience the OTC advertisements relying on the informational appeals more effective than the OTC advertisements relying on the emotional appeals. Furthermore, within emotional appeals there is a much greater variety in the experienced advertising effectiveness not providing as stabile and consistent experienced advertising effectiveness compared to the informational appeals. Thus, the OTC advertisement relying more on the emotional appeals are much more risky in terms of advertising effectiveness. There are also differences with the experienced advertising effectiveness between the Finnish consumer groups and the information can be utilised when designing tailored OTC advertisements. The Finnish men consider humorous advertisements more effective than the Finnish women. In addition, the people living outside Uusimaa Region experience higher advertising effectiveness with the advertisements relying more on the informational advertisements compared to the people living in Uusimaa Region. In similar vein, the people with lower education experience higher advertising effectiveness with the advertisements relying more on the informational advertisements compared to the people with high education. Additionally, the older generation perceive an OTC advertisement with a middle-aged celebrity more effective than the younger consumers

Mistranslations of Film Titles: Between Fidelity and Advertising

In the paper, the authors present and analyse examples of mistranslated film titles into the Polish language, selected from a database of over 1,100 titles and presented on the sample of the film genre comedy with all its subgenres. The authors discuss various film title translation strategies and procedures with reference to the literature on the subject. In the conclusions, the authors attempt to explain the reasons for the selection of certain translation procedures, with special focus on the free formulation of titles as the least transparent.

Tourist Destination Image in the New Technological Environments: Dialogism under the Public Relations Gaze

The dependence and influence of new media on social and organizational life have led to a new orientation of the communicational practices of organizations and to a research paradigm shift to a cocriational model within public relations theory. This model is based on dialogic rhetoric and dialogue that requires a joint production of content and meanings by organizations and publics, which have a central role in shaping image. The new social and communicational paradigms have also an impact on tourism research, implying the need to understand the role of new technologies, particularly websites, in image formation. The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of website in the formation of a tourist destination image (Portugal) through the understanding of the degree of adoption of dialogical principles on websites by official and unofficial tourist organizations and the identifying of denotative and connotative elements that are represented on published and shared photographs in these websites. The research corpus consisted of websites of entities and photographs published and shared on these websites. The methodology used is quantitative and qualitative, based on content analysis of data of websites and photographs. Results indicate that official tourist entities adopted the dialogic principles in a higher degree than unofficials. There is also a higher adoption of the principles related to technical dimension than dialogical dimension. Results confirm a relation between the adoption of dialogical link and an increased openness by entities to the possibility of photo sharing. The analysis of denotative and connotative elements of photography reflects a similarity in representations of entities and tourists. This study contributes to both theoretical perspectives, because it provides a conceptual scheme of destination image formation online and to a practical perspective, because it also suggests guidelines of dialogical practices to incorporate in websites of tourism entities.

The creation of a new tourist destination in low density areas: the Boticas case

CIEO-Research Centre for Spatial and Organizational Dynamics, University of Algarve

Efecto determinante de la motivación de viaje sobre la imagen de destino en turistas de ocio a un destino urbano: El caso de Monterrey, México. Una aproximación por medio de mínimos cuadrados parciales (PLS) = Determinant effect of travel motivation on the destination image of leisure tourist in an urban destination: the case of Monterrey, México. An approach through partial least squares (PLS)

Los turistas urbanos se caracterizan por ser uno de los segmentos de mayor crecimiento en los mercados turísticos actuales. Monterrey (México), uno de los principales destinos urbanos del país, ha apostado en la actualidad por mejorar su competitividad. Esta investigación se propuso encontrar evidencia acerca de la relación causal de la motivación de viaje sobre la imagen percibida del destino, dos variables importantes por su influencia en la satisfacción de los visitantes. Una revisión de la literatura permitió proponer constructos teóricos integrados en un instrumento para la recogida de datos vía encuesta a una muestra representativa. Por medio del método de regresión y ecuaciones estructurales por mínimos cuadrados parciales (PLS), se identificaron los componentes principales de ambas variables y se obtuvo un modelo explicativo de la imagen percibida del destino en función de la motivación de viaje. Finalmente, se emiten recomendaciones para la gestión del destino urbano en función de los resultados obtenidos. ABSTRACT: Abstract Urban tourists are recognized as one of the fastest growing segments in today’s tourism markets. Monterrey, Mexico, one of the main urban destinations in the country aims at improving its competitiveness. This research work had the purpose of finding evidence on the causal relationship between travel motivation and destination image, two important variables because of their influence on visitors’ satisfaction. A literature review enabled the proposal of a research instrument with theoretically based constructs to gather data through survey from a representative sample. Using regression and structural equations modelling by partial least squares (pls) a set of main components of both variables were identified thus enabling the obtention of a explanatory model of destination image in terms of travel motivations. Finally based on the results some recommendations of tourism management are given.