Inefficiencies in Digital Advertising Markets

Digital advertising markets are growing and attracting increased scrutiny. This article explores four market inefficiencies that remain poorly understood: ad effect measurement, frictions between and within advertising channel members, ad blocking, and ad fraud. Although these topics are not unique to digital advertising, each manifests in unique ways in markets for digital ads. The authors identify relevant findings in the academic literature, recent developments in practice, and promising topics for future research

Outline of a multilevel approach of the network society

Social and media networks, the Internet in particular, increasingly link interpersonal, organizational and mass communication. It is argued that this gives a cause for an interdisciplinary and multilevel approach of the network society. This will have to link traditional micro- and meso-level research of social and communication ties (Rogers, Granovetter a.o.) to the macro-level research of the network society at large (Castells a.o.).\ud Systems theory linked to a theory of communicative action establishes a potential basis for a multilevel theory. The systems theory described uses elements of a biologically inspired analysis of networks as complex adaptive systems and the mathematically inspired theory of random and scale-free networks recently elaborated by Barabási, Strogatz and Watts. The outline of the multilevel theory is summarized in ten statements about changing relationships in the network society: an information society with structures and modes of organization primarily shaped by social and media networks. \ud In the last section an inventory is made of the theoretical and methodological changes communication science will have to make to develop a general theory of the information and the network society in the perspective of communication

Loyalty in Online Communities

Loyalty is an essential component of multi-community engagement. When users have the choice to engage with a variety of different communities, they often become loyal to just one, focusing on that community at the expense of others. However, it is unclear how loyalty is manifested in user behavior, or whether loyalty is encouraged by certain community characteristics. In this paper we operationalize loyalty as a user-community relation: users loyal to a community consistently prefer it over all others; loyal communities retain their loyal users over time. By exploring this relation using a large dataset of discussion communities from Reddit, we reveal that loyalty is manifested in remarkably consistent behaviors across a wide spectrum of communities. Loyal users employ language that signals collective identity and engage with more esoteric, less popular content, indicating they may play a curational role in surfacing new material. Loyal communities have denser user-user interaction networks and lower rates of triadic closure, suggesting that community-level loyalty is associated with more cohesive interactions and less fragmentation into subgroups. We exploit these general patterns to predict future rates of loyalty. Our results show that a user's propensity to become loyal is apparent from their first interactions with a community, suggesting that some users are intrinsically loyal from the very beginning.Comment: Extended version of a paper appearing in the Proceedings of ICWSM 2017 (with the same title); please cite the official ICWSM versio

The Beauty Industry\u27s Influence on Women in Society

There has been a significant amount of research done on the effect that advertising in the fashion and beauty industry has on women. By creating advertisements with unrealistic images of beauty, it has resulted in anxiety, low self-esteem, and low self-confidence in many women. Most of these negative emotions stems from unhappiness among body and appearance. Less research has been performed relating to cosmetics and how this can have an influence on women, and how women can use cosmetics to manipulate their appearance. This paper first discusses the existing research that focuses on the cosmetic industry’s influence on women. From this research, a general survey was created in order to gather general information about a group of college student’s cosmetic usage, habits, and beliefs. The results indicate that college women are high users of cosmetics, are very aware of the cosmetic industry, and that some individual differences can have an effect on the choices a woman makes regarding cosmetics

Social Media’s impact on Intellectual Property Rights

This is a draft chapter. The final version is available in Handbook of Research on Counterfeiting and Illicit Trade, edited by Peggy E. Chaudhry, published in 2017 by Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd, https://doi.org/10.4337/9781785366451. This material is for private use only, and cannot be used for any other purpose without further permission of the publisher.Peer reviewe

The power of like 2: how social marketing works

The Power of Like 2: How Social Marketing Works is the second research report in a series examining the ways in which brands can quantify the paid and earned effects of their social marketing programs on Facebook and optimize their efforts. The analysis leverages data and insights from the comScore Social Essentials™ and comScore AdEffx™ products. By understanding the core elements of maximizing reach on Facebook – Fan Reach, Engagement, and Amplification – brands can benchmark their performance against other brands and devise strategies to improve on these dimensions and deliver measurable social marketing ROI. The report includes original analysis demonstrating ways in which exposure to earned and paid media on Facebook drives behavioral lifts in purchase behavior. &nbsp

Excitable human dynamics driven by extrinsic events in massive communities

Using empirical data from a social media site (Twitter) and on trading volumes of financial securities, we analyze the correlated human activity in massive social organizations. The activity, typically excited by real-world events and measured by the occurrence rate of international brand names and trading volumes, is characterized by intermittent fluctuations with bursts of high activity separated by quiescent periods. These fluctuations are broadly distributed with an inverse cubic tail and have long-range temporal correlations with a $1/f$ power spectrum. We describe the activity by a stochastic point process and derive the distribution of activity levels from the corresponding stochastic differential equation. The distribution and the corresponding power spectrum are fully consistent with the empirical observations.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figure

IMC customer-based perception: strategic antecedents and consequences on post-purchase customer behaviour

Last decades Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) have been mainly analysed from a managerial perspective, overlooking the customer opinion. Thus, this research studies IMC customer-based perception, its strategic antecedents and consequences on post-purchase customer behaviour (satisfaction, word-of-mouth recommendations, and repurchase intention), from a multi-country perspective. The structural equation modelling and multi-group analysis are based on the customers´ survey data in Belarus and Spain. The results suggest that technology orientation positively affects IMC, and, customer orientation does not. IMC positively affects customer satisfaction, which in turn positively impacts on WOM and repurchase intention. WOM does not influence on repurchase intention. IMC directly affects WOM and repurchase intention in Spain and does not in Belarus, which is the significant country difference