Advertisements’ Perpetuation of Rape Culture: A look at how images containing objectification and victimization impact consumers

The research I have conducted explores connections between images shown in advertisements and the perpetuation of rape culture and gendered stereotypes in society. It was guided by the Cultivation Theory which looks at how media, such as advertisements, can shape our reality. After an extensive literature review, data was gathered via an experimental design utilizing surveys. Within these surveys, respondents were randomly shown an advertisement I created containing the variables to be tested (i.e. images with objectification and victimization). After viewing the ad, they answered questions regarding their attitude toward the brand/product depicted, purchase intentions, a rape myth acceptance scale (Burt, 1980), and a sex role stereotyping scale (Burt, 1980). Both of these scales are widely accepted and were previously tested. Data was then analyzed to uncover any statistically significant interactions between the variables in order to gain a better understanding of how the images viewed in advertisements impact consumers’ beliefs and perceptions. Analysis revealed that while there is a model effect, meaning advertisers should use models in their ads, there isn’t any statistically significant positive difference for using images containing objectification or victimization. Using images with these variables can actually have a negative impact on the viewer’s attitude toward the ad and the brand. Additionally, analysis showed that viewing images with these variables increased the viewer’s acceptance of rape myths

Automatic Understanding of Image and Video Advertisements

There is more to images than their objective physical content: for example, advertisements are created to persuade a viewer to take a certain action. We propose the novel problem of automatic advertisement understanding. To enable research on this problem, we create two datasets: an image dataset of 64,832 image ads, and a video dataset of 3,477 ads. Our data contains rich annotations encompassing the topic and sentiment of the ads, questions and answers describing what actions the viewer is prompted to take and the reasoning that the ad presents to persuade the viewer ("What should I do according to this ad, and why should I do it?"), and symbolic references ads make (e.g. a dove symbolizes peace). We also analyze the most common persuasive strategies ads use, and the capabilities that computer vision systems should have to understand these strategies. We present baseline classification results for several prediction tasks, including automatically answering questions about the messages of the ads.Comment: To appear in CVPR 2017; data available on http://cs.pitt.edu/~kovashka/ad

ADVISE: Symbolism and External Knowledge for Decoding Advertisements

In order to convey the most content in their limited space, advertisements embed references to outside knowledge via symbolism. For example, a motorcycle stands for adventure (a positive property the ad wants associated with the product being sold), and a gun stands for danger (a negative property to dissuade viewers from undesirable behaviors). We show how to use symbolic references to better understand the meaning of an ad. We further show how anchoring ad understanding in general-purpose object recognition and image captioning improves results. We formulate the ad understanding task as matching the ad image to human-generated statements that describe the action that the ad prompts, and the rationale it provides for taking this action. Our proposed method outperforms the state of the art on this task, and on an alternative formulation of question-answering on ads. We show additional applications of our learned representations for matching ads to slogans, and clustering ads according to their topic, without extra training.Comment: To appear, Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV

News in an era of content confusion: effects of news use motivations and context on native advertising and digital news perceptions

This study examined the effects of differing native advertising framing contexts (hard versus soft news) and individuals’ news use motivations on ability to perceive commercialized content, evaluations of native advertising, and ensuing digital news perceptions. Based upon the framework of the persuasion knowledge model, an online experiment was conducted among a sample of U.S. adults (N = 684). When revealed as advertising, people were more likely to perceive the hard news rather than the soft news framing as commercial in nature. Furthermore, hard news approaches to native advertising were perceived unfavorably by audiences and tarnished the subsequent reporting of actual journalists.Accepted manuscrip

On Field Theory Thermalization from Gravitational Collapse

Motivated by its field theory interpretation, we study gravitational collapse of a minimally coupled massless scalar field in Einstein gravity with a negative cosmological constant. After demonstrating the accuracy of the numerical algorithm for the questions we are interested in, we investigate various aspects of the apparent horizon formation. In particular, we study the time and radius of the apparent horizon formed as functions of the initial Gaussian profile for the scalar field. We comment on several aspects of the dual field theory picture.Comment: 31 pages, 17 figures; V2 Some figures corrected, minor revision. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1106.233