Offensive advertising, public policy, and the law: the rulings on the Zagorka case

This paper examines the case of a controversial beer advertisement which was promulgated in Bulgaria in 2001, and which provoked eight lawsuits against the brewery, its advertising agency, and the Bulgarian National Television. The case set a precedent in Bulgaria and generated considerable public interest and debate. To the best of the authors’ knowledge this is the first case in Eastern Europe when individuals have challenged companies in the courts of law because of offence caused by an advertisement. The present study discusses how the public bodies responsible for protecting consumer interests and the courts of first instance assessed the advertisement in the context of Bulgarian public policy regarding offensive advertising.

Impact of captions on deaf and hearing perception of multimedia video clips

We investigate the impact of captions on deaf and hearing perception of multimedia video clips. We measure perception using a parameter called Quality of Perception (QoP), which encompasses not only a user's satisfaction with multimedia clips, but also his/her ability to perceive, synthesise and analyse the informational content of such presentations. By studying perceptual diversity, it is our aim to identify trends that will help future implementation of adaptive multimedia technologies. Results show that although hearing level has a significant affect on information assimilation, the effect of captions is not significant on the objective level of information assimilated. Deaf participants predict that captions significantly improve their level of information assimilation, although no significant objective improvement was measured. The level of enjoyment is unaffected by a participant’s level of hearing or use of captions.

Research methods for media and communication

A user friendly and comprehensive introduction to media and communications research. It introduces the various qualitative and quantitative research methods commonly used in the social sciences as applied to media studies, communication, journalism, public relations and advertising. Author from Deakin University, Australia.

The cost-effectiveness of removing television advertising of high-fat and/or high-sugar food and beverages to Australian children

Objective: To model the health benefits and cost-effectiveness of banning television (TV) advertisements in Australia for energy-dense, nutrient-poor food and beverages during children's peak viewing times.

Methods: Benefits were modelled as changes in body mass index (BMI) and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) saved. Intervention costs (AUD$) were compared with future health-care cost offsets from reduced prevalence of obesity-related health conditions. Changes in BMI were assumed to be maintained through to adulthood. The comparator was current practice, the reference year was 2001, and the discount rate for costs and benefits was 3%. The impact of the withdrawal of non-core food and beverage advertisements on children's actual food consumption was drawn from the best available evidence (a randomized controlled trial of advertisement exposure and food consumption). Supporting evidence was found in ecological relationships between TV advertising and childhood obesity, and from the effects of marketing bans on other products. A Working Group of stakeholders provided input into decisions surrounding the modelling assumptions and second-stage filters of 'strength of evidence', 'equity', 'acceptability to stakeholders', 'feasibility of implementation', 'sustainability' and 'side-effects'.

Results: The intervention had a gross incremental cost-effectiveness ratio of AUD$ 3.70 (95% uncertainty interval (UI) $2.40, $7.70) per DALY. Total DALYs saved were 37 000 (95% UI 16 000, 59 000). When the present value of potential savings in future health-care costs was considered (AUD$ 300m (95% UI $130m, $480m), the intervention was 'dominant', because it resulted in both a health gain and a cost offset compared with current practice.

Conclusions: Although recognizing the limitations of the available evidence, restricting TV food advertising to children would be one of the most cost-effective population-based interventions available to governments today. Despite its economic credentials from a public health perspective, the initiative is strongly opposed by food and advertising industries and is under review by the current Australian government.

The problems of equivalence in advertising translation: examples from English and Russian

Abstract The academic environment has recently recognized the importance and benefits that an extensive research on the translation of advertising can have for translation studies. Despite the growing interest and increasing research activity in the field it is still difficult to speak about a theory of advertising translation in general. There is a need for further study encompassing different languages and both heterogeneous and homogenous cultures that will give the possibility to receive a more complete map of what the translation of advertising is and should be. Previous studies have been concentrated, for the most part, on Western European language pairs. This study is a research into perfume and cosmetics print advertisements translated from English into Russian where both visual and verbal elements are considered. Three broad translation approaches have been identified in what concerns the verbal message: Translated message, parallel translation, recreated adverts, and three approaches in dealing with the image: similar images, modified images, completely different images. The thesis shows that where Russian advertisements for perfume products tend to have a message, or create one, this is often lacking in the English copy. The article ends by suggesting that perfume advertisements favor the standardization approach when entering Russian market. The attempts to localize the advert have also been noticed although they are obviously less numerous in perfume adverts and are rather instances of adaptation - a mix between the localization and standardization approaches since they keep drawing on the same globally accepted universals about female beauty and concern for ‘woman’s identity’ (we focused our analysis on products designed for female consumers). This study, complementing previous studies, aims to be a contribution to the description of laws and strategies that guide the translation of advertising texts into Russian.

Video Composer and Live Video Conductor: Future Professions for the Interactive Digital Broadcasting Industry

Innovations in hardware and network technologies lead to an exploding number of non-interrelated parallel media streams. Per se this does not mean any additional value for consumers. Broadcasting and advertisement industries have not yet found new formats to reach the individual user with their content. In this work we propose and describe a novel digital broadcasting framework, which allows for the live staging of (mass) media events and improved consumer personalisation. In addition new professions for future TV production workflows which will emerge are described, namely the 'video composer' and the 'live video conductor'.

Content Classification of Multimedia Documents using Partitions of Low-Level Features

Audio-visual documents obtained from German TV news are classified according to the IPTC topic categorization scheme. To this end usual text classification techniques are adapted to speech, video, and non-speech audio. For each of the three modalities word analogues are generated: sequences of syllables for speech, “video words” based on low level color features (color moments, color correlogram and color wavelet), and “audio words” based on low-level spectral features (spectral envelope and spectral flatness) for non-speech audio. Such audio and video words provide a means to represent the different modalities in a uniform way. The frequencies of the word analogues represent audio-visual documents: the standard bag-of-words approach. Support vector machines are used for supervised classification in a 1 vs. n setting. Classification based on speech outperforms all other single modalities. Combining speech with non-speech audio improves classification. Classification is further improved by supplementing speech and non-speech audio with video words. Optimal F-scores range between 62% and 94% corresponding to 50% - 84% above chance. The optimal combination of modalities depends on the category to be recognized. The construction of audio and video words from low-level features provide a good basis for the integration of speech, non-speech audio and video.

MHP Oriented Interactive Augmented Reality System for Sports Broadcasting Environments

Television and movie images have been altered ever since it was technically possible. Nowadays embedding advertisements, or incorporating text and graphics in TV scenes, are common practice, but they can not be considered as integrated part of the scene. The introduction of new services for interactive augmented television is discussed in this paper. We analyse the main aspects related with the whole chain of augmented reality production. Interactivity is one of the most important added values of the digital television: This paper aims to break the model where all TV viewers receive the same final image. Thus, we introduce and discuss the new concept of interactive augmented television, i. e. real time composition of video and computer graphics - e.g. a real scene and freely selectable images or spatial rendered objects - edited and customized by the end user within the context of the user's set top box and TV receiver.

Determinants of Advertising Effectiveness: The Development of an International Advertising Elasticity Database and a Meta-Analysis

Increasing demand for marketing accountability requires an efficient allocation of marketing expenditures. Managers who know the elasticity of their marketing instruments can allocate their budgets optimally. Meta-analyses offer a basis for deriving benchmark elasticities for advertising. Although they provide a variety of valuable insights, a major shortcoming of prior meta-analyses is that they report only generalized results as the disaggregated raw data are not made available. This problem is highly relevant because coding of empirical studies, at least to a certain extent, involves subjective judgment. For this reason, meta-studies would be more valuable if researchers and practitioners had access to disaggregated data allowing them to conduct further analyses of individual, e.g., product-level-specific, interests. We are the first to address this gap by providing (1) an advertising elasticity database (AED) and (2) empirical generalizations about advertising elasticities and their determinants. Our findings indicate that the average current-period advertising elasticity is 0.09, which is substantially smaller than the value 0f 0.12 that was recently reported by Sethuraman, Tellis, and Briesch (2011). Furthermore, our meta-analysis reveals a wide range of significant determinants of advertising elasticity. For example, we find that advertising elasticities are higher (i) for hedonic and experience goods than for other goods; (ii) for new than for established goods; (iii) when advertising is measured in gross rating points (GRP) instead of absolute terms; and (iv) when the lagged dependent or lagged advertising variable is omitted.

Towards automatic tweet generation: A comparative study from the text summarization perspective in the journalism genre

In recent years, Twitter has become one of the most important microblogging services of the Web 2.0. Among the possible uses it allows, it can be employed for communicating and broadcasting information in real time. The goal of this research is to analyze the task of automatic tweet generation from a text summarization perspective in the context of the journalism genre. To achieve this, different state-of-the-art summarizers are selected and employed for producing multi-lingual tweets in two languages (English and Spanish). A wide experimental framework is proposed, comprising the creation of a new corpus, the generation of the automatic tweets, and their assessment through a quantitative and a qualitative evaluation, where informativeness, indicativeness and interest are key criteria that should be ensured in the proposed context. From the results obtained, it was observed that although the original tweets were considered as model tweets with respect to their informativeness, they were not among the most interesting ones from a human viewpoint. Therefore, relying only on these tweets may not be the ideal way to communicate news through Twitter, especially if a more personalized and catchy way of reporting news wants to be performed. In contrast, we showed that recent text summarization techniques may be more appropriate, reflecting a balance between indicativeness and interest, even if their content was different from the tweets delivered by the news providers.

Advertising 1972. Hearings, Ninety-second Congress, second session, on S. 1461, to require the furnishing of documentation of claims concerning safety, performance, efficacy, characteristics, and comparative price of advertised products and services [and] S. 1753 amendment no. 1118 to establish a National Institute of Advertising, Marketing, Society. May 16, 18, and 31, 1972

"Serial no. 92-72."

Fifty years of the pioneer spirit : a retrospect of a half-century of endeavor which has produced a present-day organization equipped to render a very useful and complete service in advertising and printing.

"This book is dedicated to the memory of Richard Dexter Knight and Frank Davenport Livermore on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the business which they founded"

Advertising agency & studio skills; a guide to the preparation of art and mechanicals for reproduction.

Includes bibliography.