Environmental advertising in China and the USA: the desire to go green

Book Review Environmental advertising in China and the USA: the desire to go green, by Xinghua Li, London and New York, NY, Routledge, 2016, 158 pp., £90.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-415-74413-

Advertising in contemporary consumer culture

This is the first scholarly book dedicated to reading the work of contemporary filmmakers and their impact on modern marketing and advertising. Drawing from consumer culture theory, film and media studies, the author presents an expansive analysis of a range of renowned filmmakers who have successfully applied their aesthetic and narrative vision to commercial advertising. It challenges some traditional advertising tropes and sheds light on the changing nature of advertising in the contemporary media context. Utilising Deleuze and Guattari's notion of assemblage, this book addresses themes of spatiality and time, narrative and aesthetics and consumer reception within a new frame of reference that re-contextualises classical concepts of genre, platform and aesthetic categories. These diverse elements are embedded into a larger discussion of the resonance of contemporary advertising for consumer culture and the implications of the hybridity characteristic of convergent media platforms for understanding the potential of advertising in the twenty-first century. It offers a cutting-edge, interdisciplinary perspective for researchers, academics, and practitioners working in marketing communications, advertising, and media studies

An evaluation of the state of the CSR field in Australia: Perspectives from the banking and mining sectors

While Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become established in the managerial lexicon, its meaning and application varies according to geographical and sector contexts. In this chapter, we focus on the application of CSR across the banking and mining sectors in Australia to analyse the ways in which this managerial mechanism, with its theoretical underpinnings of social, environmental and economic balance, has been strategically appropriated and applied. We pose the key questions of how has CSR been implemented in Australia's largest industries and, secondarily, why has CSR not been more effective in transforming business practice in Australia? To demonstrate the alternative purposes to which CSR has been put, we use two case studies drawn from Australia's two most visible industries. The purpose of these case studies is to illustrate the larger conceptual ambiguity or fragmentation endemic to CSR and how this ambiguity affects its application - and therefore effectiveness - across different contexts

Vista, vision and visual consumption from the Age of Enlightenment

Drawing on previous discussions of visual consumption in marketing, this paper uses two historical examples to examine visuality and the enduring effect of the Age of Enlightenment on visual consumption. Drawing on the French garden and the philosophical trope of the Molyneux Man, the manner in which the consumption experience is mediated and narrated through vision is considered. It is argued that cultural perspective and individual perception work in constant dialogue to produce an individual’s ability to consume, or ‘take in’, visual signs inherent to our world. From the Enlightenment, this interaction has characterized the contemporary consumer’s world, but, importantly for marketing communications, this becomes more significant in today’s burgeoning visual consumption experiences