The differentiated effect of advertising on readership: evidence from a two-sided market approach

In this paper, we empirically analyze the French print media market by modeling the existence of a reciprocal effect between the size of the readership and the amount of advertising. For this two-sided platform, we measure the cross-effects of advertising on the readership and periodical popularity on advertising. By estimating a structural model of simultaneous demand equations, we quantify some crucial elements in designing pricing and product-differentiating strategies. We measure the impact of advertising on reader demand and find in the data that it has opposite effects depending on whether the publication presents informational or entertaining content. By taking into account the market interactions, we compute price and advertising elasticities. Our results show that advertisers targeting a specific category of the audience would choose its corresponding periodicals and would trade off the size of the readership for these periodicals and the advertising insert price changes. Also, advertising campaigns aimed at reaching a broader spectrum of the population should focus on popular titles and on titles for which demand is inelastic to ensure a more consistent impact of the campaign. Finally, for magazines with low price demand elasticity on the readers’ side, editors’ revenues could be improved by increasing prices. These combined effects should allow a publisher to generate positive margins from both sides of the market, for certain content categories.     

The informative and persuasive functions of advertising: A moral appraisal

Advertising can be regarded as having two separate functions, one of persuading and one of informing consumers. Against some who claim that persuasive advertising using irrational means is moral as long as the product or service it represents is good or useful, this paper argues that by denigrating human reason such advertising is always immoral. On the other hand, advertisements which present information in a straight-forward and truthful way are always moral no matter what they advertise; indeed, only such advertisements are moral.     

2009：变化的媒体广告市场

2009年对中国广告业来说将“马太”效应明显倍增的年份,对此,许多业内人士已经有所感受媒体、广告主、广告公司都将在这一年经受残酷考验,平稳过度的市场因子会成为最后的赢家,并在未来两年获得先定优势。“马太”效应将以怎样的方式呈现,各大行业竞争态势将会如何演化,广告业内谁将在这场淘汰赛中逆势上行,本刊选取市场调研机构、学者、广告公司、新媒体的部分精彩观点,以供读者参考。     

The informative and persuasive functions of advertising: A moral appraisal — A further comment

This paper argues that product and advertisement are neither completely dependent nor completely independent. The advertisement of a bad product cannot be good. The advertisement of a good product is not necessarily good. In the case where consumer sovereignty cannot be assumed, the goodness of an advertisement depends solely on the goodness of the product. In the case where consumer sovereignty can be assumed, the goodness of an advertisement depends first on whether the product is good, and if so, whether the advertisement preserves individual autonomy. Kam-Hon Lee is Senior Lecturer in Marketing at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His publications appeared in journals such as European Journal of Marketing and The World Economy.     

治理广告市场与构建和谐社会

在市场经济条件之下,商业广告全方位、全天候地影响着社会各类人群,帮助人们沟通信息,抓住机遇、采取行动,获取利益。它对推动社会主义和谐社会建设事业,有着积极的作用。与此同时,商业广告由于量多而广,常常策划不同、制作粗糙,加上利益驱动下的商业化运作和广告制作者素养缺乏,产生的负面影响也不容忽视。这种负面影响,有时常常不利于和谐社会的构建。不利于构建和谐社会的商业广告,主要有如下表现形式:     

Dynamic market impacts of generic dairy advertising

Generic advertising of fluid milk and cheese represents the principal promotional activity undertaken with the $370 million per year provided by dairy farmers and fluid milk processors. This article describes a stock-flow-feedback simulation model that includes 17 intermediate and final dairy products, short-term and long-term milk supply response and government policies that influence the impacts of generic advertising on net revenues for dairy farmers. Permanent increases in generic advertising expenditures increase net revenues for dairy farmers, with a cumulative net benefit to cost ratio of 2.8. Permanent decreases produce a larger reduction in net revenues and indicate a net benefit to cost ratio larger than 4.5. Spending a larger proportion of existing generic advertising funds on cheese rather than fluid milk would also markedly increased dairy farmer net revenues. Generic advertising increases net revenues for dairy farmers even when industry supply response and government regulation are accounted for.     

Strategic responses to market globalisation among advertising agencies

The advertising industry is undergoing major changes as markets and clients become more global. Using the integration-responsiveness framework and the transnational framework, it is apparent that advertising agencies have a high need to be simultaneously integrated and responsive. This paper reports on a series of depth interviews with international agency leaders intended to gain an assessment of both the extent to which their firms are responding to these important but conflicting needs and the appropriateness of the framework for understanding the strategic options available for ad agency management. The findings indicate that the agencies have tried to modify their strategies to accommodate both kinds of pressures. However, their success in this regard is questioned and other broader strategic concerns are considered.     

中国广告市场发展与新媒体趋势

谈中国广告的趋势,数字确实非常重要,这个趋势背后有很多的动因。     

市场生机勃发，四川广电经营增势良好

回顾过往,全四川和整个四川广电集团都经历了精彩与波澜并存,经过地震灾害的磨难,在全国和世界源源不断的爱心和温暖帮助下奋发图强．不但在重建中进展神速．而且在金融危机中逆势前进,取得了令世人瞩目的成绩。     

垄断数据调研，WPP图谋操控中国广告市场

WPP成功收购TNS后,中国市场调研机构格局大变,WPP垄断了CTR、CSM与尼尔森中国三大最主流市场调研机构。WPP决胜市场调研的策略抓住了广告产业链的命门,如果没有制衡手段,中国广告待业的未来可能是我们不想看到的格局,很有可能这将会影响传媒健康发展、影响企业科学的品牌传播行为,继而影响企业整体品牌战略。     

Adworld2007 published online advertising market monitoring and the latest audience measurement date

9月27日．历时三天、备受业界瞩目的2007中国互联网大会圆满落下帷幕。其间9月25、26日．Adworld2007中国网络广告与互动营销年会隆重举行。与诸多行业交流会议有所不同的是．主办方在DCCI互联网数据中心支持之下．发布了2007年网络广告市场监测与受众测量阶段性的最新调研数据，为参会各方、互联网与网络广告业界的交流互动．提供了立体多维的观察视角和判断依据。本刊特选出几组最新调研成果．以飨读者。[第一段]     

Pricing practices and firms' market power in international cellular markets, an empirical study

Previous studies on international marketing have typically asked the question: “how is the demand characterized across countries?” Such analysis is then used to provide guidelines for firms to enter new markets and/or to allocate marketing resources across countries. To provide such normative guidelines, however, one also needs to analyze the supply-side of the problem, i.e., ask: “what is the likely market power that firms will be able to command in different countries?” Building on the New Empirical Industrial Organization (NEIO) framework, recent research in marketing provides marketers with a variety of models to explore competitive interactions among firms in the context of a single market. The goal of this paper is to extend this literature to a multimarket/multinational context to help international marketers assess the likely market power they face when entering new countries. We illustrate the proposed method on the mobile telecommunications industry, using price and quantity data from 10 countries around the world, estimating firms' market power as a function of a number of country characteristics.The results indicate that, while the simple presence of competition diminishes firms' market power, it does not lead to perfect competition. Interestingly, a higher number of competitors in a country does not seem to have significant incremental effect on market power. In contrast, the country's commitment to a severe antitrust policy has a significant negative effect, while the monopolist's lead-time before competition is allowed has a significant positive effect on market power. These findings, together with a change in price elasticities as a result of competition, suggest that market power in different countries may originate from two sources: (i) collusive pricing among cellular operators and (ii) consumers' switching costs across service providers. For international marketers, the findings imply that the attractiveness of wealthier countries (with usually faster diffusion rates and larger market potential) may be mitigated by higher levels of competition (as a result of developed antitrust regulation and more consumer exposure to competitive marketing practices). From a policy point of view, it suggests that (in contrast to the conventional wisdom) simple deregulation may not be enough to reduce prices to competitive levels. In addition, a severe antitrust policy is crucial to achieve this goal.     

3G时代：手机媒体将引发广告市场变革

“忽然间,你会发现全世界最强大的公司突然成了自己的竞争对手,这的确令人难以置信,我们的竞争对手已经变成了苹果、谷歌和微软。”诺基亚CEO康培凯如此感慨。相信康培凯会在中国找到很多共鸣者,因为随着3G的到来,这种情况也正在中国发生。     

The informative and persuasive components of pharmaceutical promotion

The objective of this paper is to review the literature on pharmaceutical promotion, highlighting the areas of contention. We examine the traditional methods used to promote pharmaceutical products and ask the question, ‘If the objective of promotion is to inform, persuade and remind the customer about why they should consider a particular product or brand, why is the promotion of pharmaceutical products so contentious?’ We draw upon the results of an exploratory case study that examined healthcare practitioner and pharmaceutical sales representative attitudes towards pharmaceutical promotion, and conclude with some thoughts on how information-based and persuasion-based pharmaceutical promotion can coexist.     

Assessing advertising content in a hospital advertising campaign: An application of Puto and Wells (1984) measure of informational and transformational advertising content

The following is a report of a study designed to measure advertising content based on the cognitive and affective elements of informational (i.e., information processing) and transformational (i.e., experiential) content using the measure of advertising informational and transformational content developed by Puto and Wells (1984). A university hospital advertising campaign designed to be high in transformational content did not appear to affect perceived quality of local university hospitals relative to private hospitals or increase the likelihood of choosing a university hospital in the future. Further, experiences with university hospitals that seemed to be in direct contrast to the content of the advertisements based on subject perceptions affected how university hospital advertisements were perceived in terms of content. Conclusions and implications for hospital advertising campaigns are discussed.     

Targeted advertising as a signal

This study presents a signaling model of advertising for horizontally differentiated products. The central ingredients of the model are two important characteristics of advertising—targeting, and noisy information content. The theory yields interesting results about the informational role of targeted advertising, and its consequences. First, targeting can itself serve as a signal on product attributes. Second, the effectiveness of targeting depends not only on firms knowing consumer preferences, but on consumers knowing that firms know this. This creates a distinction between strategies of targeting and personalization. Third, the effectiveness of targeting in equilibrium may (far) exceed the information contained directly in the targeted message. Fourth, information content is not, however, superfluous. Specifically, when ads contain no information, a targeting equilibrium does not exist. Together, these results reveal how advertising conveys information both through the content of the message and the firm’s choice of advertising medium. Furthermore, the model is robust to the various critiques of prior work on ads-as-signals: namely, that ad content is irrelevant, ad exposure is unnecessary, and the choice of ads as signals is inherently arbitrary.

Product Category Pricing and Future Price Attractiveness: 99-Ending Pricing in a Memory-Based Context

Two experiments were used to examine the impact of 99-ending pricing on memory-based comparisons with a multiple product set. Results indicate that when a target is priced above/below a stimulus set, use of 99-ending prices for the highest and lowest prices in the stimulus set lessens target price attractiveness compared to when the highest and lowest prices are 00-ending. Attractiveness of targets priced within the stimulus set was not impacted by the use of 99- versus 00-ending pricing. Overall, participants appear to use an assimilation/contrast approach based upon left-digit processing in determining target price attractiveness.