Native advertising : attitudes, value and purchase intention

textNative-form advertising in the digital space can most easily be defined as promotional content constructed to mimic the form and structure of the website that it is embedded on. With the rise of user generated content and social media, digital native advertising is fast becoming a popular promotional tactic for brands looking to engage with an online audience. This study examines whether this form of advertising significantly impacts consumer attitudes towards the ad, value of the ad and purchase intention of the promoted product across three product categories. Although not significant, results suggest that native advertising positively impacts entertainment- and lifestyle-based products, while information-based service industries, including cyber security, saw a negative reaction from respondents. That said, product category did influence attitude toward the ad and ad value regardless of the ad type. Moreover, a strong positive correlation between product involvement and purchase intention was found, indicating the need to target specific audiences with online native advertising.Advertisin

The applications of social media in sports marketing

n the era of big data, sports consumer's activities in social media become valuable assets to sports marketers. In this paper, the authors review extant literature regarding how to effectively use social media to promote sports as well as how to effectively analyze social media data to support business decisions. Methods: The literature review method. Results: Our findings suggest that sports marketers can use social media to achieve the following goals, such as facilitating marketing communication campaigns, adding values to sports products and services, creating a two-way communication between sports brands and consumers, supporting sports sponsorship program, and forging brand communities. As to how to effectively analyze social media data to support business decisions, extent literature suggests that sports marketers to undertake traffic and engagement analysis on their social media sites as well as to conduct sentiment analysis to probe customer's opinions. These insights can support various aspects of business decisions, such as marketing communication management, consumer's voice probing, and sales predictions. Conclusion: Social media are ubiquitous in the sports marketing and consumption practices. In the era of big data, these ＂footprints＂ can now be effectively analyzed to generate insights to support business decisions. Recommendations to both the sports marketing practices and research are also addressed

'Preditors': Making citizen journalism work

Although there is great interest in citizen journalism services that harness user-generated content, the continuing contribution of professional staff who coordinate such efforts is often overlooked. This paper offers a typology of the work of the professional "preditors" who continue to operate at the heart of "pro-am" journalism initiatives. It shows that their work takes place along four dimensions – content work, networking, community work and tech work. It suggests that this is a structural change in journalistic practice, which has implications for journalists' professional identity and journalism education

The cathedral and the bazaar of e-repository development: encouraging community engagement with moving pictures and sound

This paper offers an insight into the development, use and governance of e‐repositories for learning and teaching, illustrated by Eric Raymond's bazaar and cathedral analogies and by a comparison of collection strategies that focus on content coverage or on the needs of users. It addresses in particular the processes that encourage and achieve community engagement. This insight is illustrated by one particular e‐repository, the Education Media On‐Line (EMOL) service. This paper draws analogies between the bazaar approach for open source software development and its possibilities for developing e‐repositories for learning and teaching. It suggests in particular that the development, use and evaluation of online moving pictures and sound objects for learning and teaching can benefit greatly from the community engagement lessons provided by the development, use and evaluation of open source software. Such lessons can be underpinned by experience in the area of learning resource collections, where repositories have been classified as ‘collections‐based’ or ‘user‐based’. Lessons from the open source movement may inform the development of e‐repositories such as EMOL in the future

“You Must Construct Additional Pylons”: Building a Better Framework for Esports Governance

The popularity of “esports,” also known as “electronic sports” or competitive video gaming, has exploded in recent years and captured the attention of cord-cutting millennials—often to the detriment of sports such as basketball, football, baseball, and hockey. In the United States, the commercial dominance of such traditional sports stems from decades of regulatory support. Consequently, while esports regulation is likely to emulate many aspects of traditional sports governance, the esports industry is fraught with challenges that inhibit sophisticated ownership and capital investment. Domestic regulation is complicated by underlying intellectual property ownership and ancillary considerations such as fluctuations in a video game’s popularity. Since analogous reform is nigh impossible, nascent governance organizations have been created to support the professionalization of esports as a new entertainment form. As esports consumption continues to grow, enterprising stakeholders are presented with the unique opportunity to create regulatory bodies that will shape the esports industry. This Note analyzes how the professional sports industry and foreign esports markets have addressed governance challenges that arise from differences between traditional sports and competitive video gaming. It concludes by exploring two potential pathways for domestic esports governance. View PD

Eliciting Behavior From Interactive Narratives: Isolating the Role of Agency in Connecting With and Modeling Characters

A key component differentiating interactive storytelling from non-interactive media is agency, or control over character choices. A series of experiments show that providing agency over a character increased the user-character connection, which then increased engagement in a character-consistent charitable act. Findings were observed in technologically simple online narratives that controlled for navigation/controller differences, graphics, sounds, lengthy play, and avatar customization. Effects emerged even though users did not practice these acts by making their character behave charitably. Findings were robust across happy and unfortunate endings and across first-, second-, and third-person narrative perspectives. Findings suggest promise for developing inexpensive ‘‘storygames’’ to encourage supportive behaviors

Researching and enhancing athlete welfare: Proceedings of the Second International Symposium of the Brunel International Research Network for Athlete Welfare (BIRNAW) 2013

Copyright @ 2014 Brunel University. All rights reserved by the authors who assert their rights under the Berne Convention. Copyright rests with Brunel University London. All research designs, concepts, models and theories herein are the intellectual property of the contributing authors. No part of this document may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of Dr Daniel Rhind via Brunel University London.The chapters within this book are based on presentations delivered at the 2nd BIRNAW Symposium which was held at Brunel University London in November 2013.Sport is a cultural phenomenon that touches the lives and captures the imagination of many people. Most people assume that sport is “a good thing” and that participation in sport will bring physical, psychological and social benefits to participants and societies. However, as this body of work shows, this is not necessarily or always the case. Abuse and exploitation can and does occur in sport – a fact that sports enthusiasts and sports organisations have been slow to acknowledge. The Brunel International Research Network for Athlete Welfare (BIRNAW) is a remarkable initiative that brings together researchers and policy makers from a variety of disciplines, organisations and countries. The activities and publications of this group have successfully provided an evidence base that has drawn attention to the issues in a powerful and convincing way. Its impact on the world of sport has been significant and is an excellent example of research informing sport policy and improving the practice of sport. Through the work of those involved in BIRNAW, inspired by the vision of Celia Brackenridge and her colleagues at Brunel University London, awareness has been raised, and safeguarding measures are being put in place to ensure the welfare of athletes. There is still much to be done, but the world of sport, and those athletes whose welfare is now safeguarded, already have much to thank them for

The paradox of tenant empowerment: regulatory and liberatory possibilities

Tenant empowerment has traditionally been regarded as a means of realising democratic ideals: a quantitative increase in influence and control, which thereby enables "subjects" to acquire the fundamental properties of "citizens". By contrast governmentality, as derived from the work of Michel Foucault, offers a more critical appraisal of the concept of empowerment by highlighting how it is itself a mode of subjection and a means of regulating human conduct towards particular ends. Drawing on particular data about how housing governance has changed in Glasgow following its 2003 stock transfer, this paper adopts the insights of governmentality to illustrate how the political ambition of "community ownership" has been realized through the mobilization and shaping of active tenant involvement in the local decision making process. In addition, it also traces the tensions and conflict inherent in the reconfiguration of power relations post-transfer for "subjects" do not necessarily conform to the plans of those that seek to govern them