Who's Feeding the Kids Online? Digital food marketing to children in Ireland: Advertisers’ tactics, children’s exposure and parents’ awareness

Obesity in children and young people is a global health challenge. The widespread marketing of unhealthy foods (food and non-alcoholic drinks high in fat, sugar and salt, or HFSS) plays a causal role in unhealthy eating and obesity. Food and eating is typically presented as an issue of ‘choice’. However, this disregards the fact that current obesogenic environments use many tactics to promote unhealthy foods, interfering with people’s ability to make good choices. This study examined: 1. Content appealing to children and young people on websites of top food and drink retail brands in Ireland 2. Marketing techniques on Facebook: Pages of food brands that have the highest reach among young teens, the first such study of which we are aware 3. Parents’ awareness of digital food marketing to their children in an online, two-stage survey with digital marketing examples and open-ended response options

Chasing Sustainability on the Net : International research on 69 journalistic pure players and their business models

This report outlines how online-based journalistic startups have created their economical locker in the evolving media ecology. The research introduces the ways that startups have found sustainability in the markets of ten countries. The work is based on 69 case studies from Europe, USA and Japan. The case analysis shows that business models can be divided into two groups. The storytelling-oriented business models are still prevalent in our findings. These are the online journalistic outlets that produce original content – news and stories for audiences. But the other group, service-oriented business models, seems to be growing. This group consists of sites that don’t try to monetize the journalistic content as such but rather focus on carving out new functionality. The project was able to identify several revenue sources: advertising, paying for content, affiliate marketing, donations, selling data or services, organizing events, freelancing and training or selling merchandise. Where it was hard to evidence entirely new revenue sources, it was however possible to find new ways in which revenue sources have been combined or reconfigured. The report also offers practical advice for those who are planning to start their own journalistic site

Social media analytics: a survey of techniques, tools and platforms

This paper is written for (social science) researchers seeking to analyze the wealth of social media now available. It presents a comprehensive review of software tools for social networking media, wikis, really simple syndication feeds, blogs, newsgroups, chat and news feeds. For completeness, it also includes introductions to social media scraping, storage, data cleaning and sentiment analysis. Although principally a review, the paper also provides a methodology and a critique of social media tools. Analyzing social media, in particular Twitter feeds for sentiment analysis, has become a major research and business activity due to the availability of web-based application programming interfaces (APIs) provided by Twitter, Facebook and News services. This has led to an ‘explosion’ of data services, software tools for scraping and analysis and social media analytics platforms. It is also a research area undergoing rapid change and evolution due to commercial pressures and the potential for using social media data for computational (social science) research. Using a simple taxonomy, this paper provides a review of leading software tools and how to use them to scrape, cleanse and analyze the spectrum of social media. In addition, it discussed the requirement of an experimental computational environment for social media research and presents as an illustration the system architecture of a social media (analytics) platform built by University College London. The principal contribution of this paper is to provide an overview (including code fragments) for scientists seeking to utilize social media scraping and analytics either in their research or business. The data retrieval techniques that are presented in this paper are valid at the time of writing this paper (June 2014), but they are subject to change since social media data scraping APIs are rapidly changing

Is adaptation of e-advertising the way forward?

E-advertising is a multi-billion dollar industry that has shown exponential growth in the last few years. However, although the number of users accessing the Internet increases, users don’t respond positively to adverts. Adaptive e-advertising may be the key to ensuring effectiveness of the ads reaching their target. Moreover, social networks are good sources of user information and can be used to extract user behaviour and characteristics for presentation of personalized advertising. Here we present a two-sided study based on two questionnaires, one directed to Internet users and the other to businesses. Our study shows that businesses agree that personalized advertising is the best way for the future, to maximize effectiveness and profit. In addition, our results indicate that most Internet users would prefer adaptive advertisements. From this study, we can propose a new design for a system that meets both Internet users’ and businesses’ requirements

Online Dating Profile Analysis: The Intersection of Identity, Gender & Religion

According to standpoint theory, individuals experience the world based on the social groups that they belong to. Using this theoretical lens, my content analysis compared how gender and religion were conveyed on the user profiles of three online dating sites: JDate.com, ChristianMingle.com and OkCupid.com. In my initial reading of data, I used inductive thematic analysis to distinguish 7 categories of words and 7 categories of photographs that were relevant to portrayals of gender and religion. These categories were then analyzed through frequency counts by adding the total number of word types and photograph types used by men and women on each site. Findings showed an emphasis on religious cultural background on ChristianMingle.com. Gender roles were supported overall with male emphasis on career and sports and female emphasis on attractiveness and care

Rethinking affordance

n/a – Critical survey essay retheorising the concept of 'affordance' in digital media context. Lead article in a special issue on the topic, co-edited by the authors for the journal Media Theory