The Beginning of EU Political Advertising Law: Unifying Democratic Visions through the Internal Market

The regulation of political advertising has traditionally been a sensitive issue—unsurprisingly so, as it determines if and how political actors can pay to communicate with voters. Given the differences between national electoral systems and the lack of a consensus on the best regulatory approach, until recently neither the EU, the Council of Europe nor the European Court of Human Rights laid out strict standards. Following mounting concerns over the impact of opaque and manipulative targeted advertising in the 2016 US election and Brexit referendum, the EU’s proposal for a regulation on the transparency and targeting of political advertising breaks with this trend. This article analyses how the proposal is set to regulate political advertising, and evaluates how the proposed regulation fits into the EU’s competences to regulate democratic processes and affects existing national legal frameworks. The article concludes by assessing the new roles the EU and the Member States assume in political advertising regulation

An Investigation of Teenagers’ Advertising Literacy in the Context of the Brand-Rich Environment of Social Media

Teenagers are avid consumers of social media and consequently, constitute attractive target audiences for marketers. On social media, advertising can be integrated into content such as YouTube videos and Instagram posts which means the boundary between commercial content (the advertisement) and non-commercial content (e.g., the video in which the ad appears) becomes increasingly blurred. Therefore, in this context, the consumer must be able to navigate a minefield of overt and covert advertising that is disseminated by a range of sources, including brands and social media influencers. A resulting concern for academics, parents and policy makers alike relates to young people’s understanding, evaluation and critical responses to such advertising practices, i.e., their advertising literacy. In order to command a basic level of advertising literacy, consumers need to be able to recognise the source of an advertisement, identify the commercial and persuasive intent, and subsequently enact a critical response. However, this can become challenging in the context of newer advertising practices on social media platforms where advertising content can be seamlessly woven into editorial content that is interactive, entertaining, and engaging. It follows that if a young consumer cannot properly identify and respond to an advertising episode, then the act of targeting them is unethical. This thesis reports on a qualitative study of 29 teenagers aged 15–17 years. The aim was to investigate teenagers’ dispositional and situational advertising literacy in the context of the overt and covert advertising formats which prevail on social media platforms. The study sought to investigate their general knowledge, attitudes and judgements regarding advertising which develops over time (dispositional AL), but also their ability to retrieve and apply this knowledge during exposure to specific advertising episodes (situational AL). The findings indicate that whilst the participants had a highly developed associative network about SM advertising (i.e., their dispositional AL), their ability to retrieve and apply it (i.e., their situational AL) was dependent on the nature and origin of advertising. Specifically, the marketer’s ability to craft messaging which delights the consumer; emerges from a meaningful source; or provides opportunities for social learning can impede critical response

Setting Standards for Fair Information Practice in the U.S. Private Sector

The confluence of plans for an Information Superhighway, actual industry self-regulatory practices, and international pressure dictate renewed consideration of standard setting for fair information practices in the U.S. private sector. The legal rules, industry norms, and business practices that regulate the treatment of personal information in the United States are organized in a wide and dispersed manner. This Article analyzes how these standards are established in the U.S. private sector. Part I argues that the U.S. standards derive from the influence of American political philosophy on legal rule making and a preference for dispersed sources of information standards. Part II examines the aggregation of legal rules, industry norms, and business practice from these various decentralized sources. Part III ties the deficiencies back to the underlying U.S. philosophy and argues that the adherence to targeted standards has frustrated the very purposes of the narrow, ad hoc regulatory approach to setting private sector standards. Part IV addresses the irony that European pressure should force the United States to revisit the setting of standards for the private sector

A Normative Classification of Consumer Big Data

The big data phenomenon has transformed every area of life and business. Businesses today rely on the volume, velocity, and variety (3Vs) of data available today in product design, advertisement, sales, and post-sale follow up activities. Communication between the firm and the consumer is personalized using data collected on the consumer to match the consumer’s location, time, and needs. Some marketers argue that this has birth a new era of marketing; transformative marketing, in which the firm’s ability to deliver value and to acquire and maintain long-run competitive advantage determined by the firm’s data resources. In other words, data are the currency of the transformative marketing era. This sentiment is pervasive and has led to massive investments in data in recent years. This dissertation puts forward a classification of consumer big data to aid the firm extract value out of big data despite the 3Vs. The classification also demonstrates how value in a transformative marketing era does not have to be created at the expense of the consumer, but with the consumer. Five conceptual dichotomies are put forward in essay two that are more comprehensive than any other classification of data available in the research. Finally, the third essay investigates how the big data phenomenon affects consumer freedom and emotions. Most people agree that freedom is a fundamental human right, and that business practices should respect consumer freedom. However, research on consumer freedom is scant. Two experiments investigate how the characteristics of data collected on consumers affects consumer perception of decision freedom and satisfaction with value propositions. With the big data phenomenon has come a push toward algorithmic decision making. Consumer’s anxiety toward algorithmic decision making is investigated along with the satisfaction derived from decisions made by third parties that collect data on consumers