The Usage of Personal Data as Content in Integrated Marketing Communications

Personal user data has proven extremely valuable for firms in the digital age. The wealth of data available to firms has provided unprecedented access into the world of the consumer. Companies hoping to capitalize on their user's data have turned to several interesting outlets. This research addresses the repurposing of user data as content in marketing. By analyzing four cases of data presented as marketing communications across two companies, this research provides new insights into the public release of private user data for marketing purposes. Four cases of personal data used in marketing communications were chosen specifically for their time proximity, characteristics of the sending firms, and their disparate outcomes. These instances of marketing communications, two by Spotify and two by Netflix, were released during November and December of 2017 and each resulted in a diverse range of public opinion. An analysis of these cases was conducted using the comprehensive framework of integrated marketing communications (Tafesse & Kitchen, 2017). There is a significant difference in the perceptual outcomes of integrated marketing communication campaigns which display user data as content. This analysis provides insights into the characteristics of marketing communications and how their outcomes fit into broader marketing strategies. These case studies provide opportunities for marketers to improve their campaigns in line with their desired audience outcome. Patterns of scope, strategy, mode, and outcome do not suggest success or failure in the context of marketing communications, but rather a set of insights marketers should keep in mind when pursuing communication strategies which harness personal user data.No embargoAcademic Major: Marketin

An Agent-based Modelling Framework for Driving Policy Learning in Connected and Autonomous Vehicles

Due to the complexity of the natural world, a programmer cannot foresee all possible situations, a connected and autonomous vehicle (CAV) will face during its operation, and hence, CAVs will need to learn to make decisions autonomously. Due to the sensing of its surroundings and information exchanged with other vehicles and road infrastructure, a CAV will have access to large amounts of useful data. While different control algorithms have been proposed for CAVs, the benefits brought about by connectedness of autonomous vehicles to other vehicles and to the infrastructure, and its implications on policy learning has not been investigated in literature. This paper investigates a data driven driving policy learning framework through an agent-based modelling approaches. The contributions of the paper are two-fold. A dynamic programming framework is proposed for in-vehicle policy learning with and without connectivity to neighboring vehicles. The simulation results indicate that while a CAV can learn to make autonomous decisions, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication of information improves this capability. Furthermore, to overcome the limitations of sensing in a CAV, the paper proposes a novel concept for infrastructure-led policy learning and communication with autonomous vehicles. In infrastructure-led policy learning, road-side infrastructure senses and captures successful vehicle maneuvers and learns an optimal policy from those temporal sequences, and when a vehicle approaches the road-side unit, the policy is communicated to the CAV. Deep-imitation learning methodology is proposed to develop such an infrastructure-led policy learning framework

Dynamic real-time risk analytics of uncontrollable states in complex internet of things systems, cyber risk at the edge

The Internet of Things (IoT) triggers new types of cyber risks. Therefore, the integration of new IoT devices and services requires a self-assessment of IoT cyber security posture. By security posture this article refers to the cybersecurity strength of an organisation to predict, prevent and respond to cyberthreats. At present, there is a gap in the state of the art, because there are no self-assessment methods for quantifying IoT cyber risk posture. To address this gap, an empirical analysis is performed of 12 cyber risk assessment approaches. The results and the main findings from the analysis is presented as the current and a target risk state for IoT systems, followed by conclusions and recommendations on a transformation roadmap, describing how IoT systems can achieve the target state with a new goal-oriented dependency model. By target state, we refer to the cyber security target that matches the generic security requirements of an organisation. The research paper studies and adapts four alternatives for IoT risk assessment and identifies the goal-oriented dependency modelling as a dominant approach among the risk assessment models studied. The new goal-oriented dependency model in this article enables the assessment of uncontrollable risk states in complex IoT systems and can be used for a quantitative self-assessment of IoT cyber risk posture

Marketing of Library Services and Products through Social Media: An Evaluation

Social media has a great impact on information promotional activities by bringing tremendous changes in the field of marketing. Social networking applications help the users to possess interconnections among the community members and remix the library services and products to brand them visible in a broader way. This paper gives an overview of the concept of marketing of library services and products in the pretext of handiness of social networking technologies (SNT). The paper also discusses various social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Youtube, Flickr etc. An outline of how the social media may successfully be applied to enhance the effectiveness in marketing library services and products is observed. Relative merits and challenges with adoption of SNS are also examined

clicktatorship and democrazy: Social media and political campaigning

This chapter aims to direct attention to the political dimension of the social media age. Although current events like the Cambridge Analytica data breach managed to raise awareness for the issue, the systematically organized and orchestrated mechanisms at play still remain oblivious to most. Next to dangerous monopoly-tendencies among the powerful players on the market, reliance on automated algorithms in dealing with content seems to enable large-scale manipulation that is applied for economical and political purposes alike. The successful replacement of traditional parties by movements based on personality cults around marketable young faces like Emmanuel Macron or Austria’s Sebastian Kurz is strongly linked to products and services offered by an industry that simply provides likes and followers for cash. Inspired by Trump’s monopolization of the Twitter-channel, these new political acteurs use the potential of social media for effective message control, allowing them to avoid confrontations with professional journalists. In addition, an extremely active minority of organized agitators relies on the viral potential of the web to strongly influence and dictate public discourse – suggesting a shift from the Spiral of Silence to the dangerous illusion of a Nexus of Noise

Online consumer’s acceptance of social networking sites as potential shopping’s guide

The emergence of social media has significantly altered the strategies that companies use to communicate with customers ( Lee, Xiong, & Hu, 2011). As social media moves from “buzz word” status to strategic tool, more practitioners are developing skills related to this online communication technology (Eyrich, Padman, & Sweetser, 2008). With the development of networks, especially electronic commerce’s appearance, consumers enter a new environment of trade, therefore, with the high degree of price dispersion in the online market, for example, customer information, search behaviour also changes (Guan & Cheng, 2009). In fact, with the rapid development of Web 2.0 technologies, such as Ajax and XML, a great number of social networking sites (e.g., Facebook, Renren, MySpace, Kaixin, and LinkedIn) are emerging, which makes mass users interactions easier and more convenient (Yanli, Yi, & Yuli, 2010). These social media tools allow users to search, organize, share, annotate and contribute to contents in a collaborative way. For example, Curtis et al. (2010) found that social media techniques are becoming more abundant as public relations practitioners become mindful of their effectiveness in respect of reaching target audiences, promoting a specific cause, and further developing communication strategies. More than half of America’s teens and young adults send instant messages and use social networking sites, and more than one-third of all Internet users engage in these activities (Correa, Hinsley, & de Zúñiga, 2010)