Approaches taken by South African advertisers to select and appoint advertising agencies

Pitch and industry guidelines play an important role in awarding advertising agency contracts, but agencies must take into account that not all advertisers will adhere to these guidelines. The exploratory research study on which this article reports provides insight into the appointment process and selection criteria applied during the appointment of advertising agencies. This article examines the views of 116 senior marketing executives in South Africa to determine typical decision processes followed when advertising agencies are appointed. Consideration is also given to the structural arrangements in place, the composition and size of buying centres, switching barriers that make it more diffi cult or costly for advertisers to change agencies and selection criteria used to appoint advertising agencies. Data were obtained by means of structured questionnaires administered via a web-based survey. The findings provide advertisers with insights into procurement decisions and selection criteria and can also provide valuable insight to agencies with regard to buying decision approaches taken by advertisers. Insight into the size and composition of buying centres adds to agencies’ understanding of who to target during customer relationship-building initiatives. From an academic perspective, this research off ers a better understanding of the organisational buying process and the importance of selection criteria within the South African context

Semantic Sentiment Analysis of Twitter Data

Internet and the proliferation of smart mobile devices have changed the way information is created, shared, and spreads, e.g., microblogs such as Twitter, weblogs such as LiveJournal, social networks such as Facebook, and instant messengers such as Skype and WhatsApp are now commonly used to share thoughts and opinions about anything in the surrounding world. This has resulted in the proliferation of social media content, thus creating new opportunities to study public opinion at a scale that was never possible before. Naturally, this abundance of data has quickly attracted business and research interest from various fields including marketing, political science, and social studies, among many others, which are interested in questions like these: Do people like the new Apple Watch? Do Americans support ObamaCare? How do Scottish feel about the Brexit? Answering these questions requires studying the sentiment of opinions people express in social media, which has given rise to the fast growth of the field of sentiment analysis in social media, with Twitter being especially popular for research due to its scale, representativeness, variety of topics discussed, as well as ease of public access to its messages. Here we present an overview of work on sentiment analysis on Twitter.Comment: Microblog sentiment analysis; Twitter opinion mining; In the Encyclopedia on Social Network Analysis and Mining (ESNAM), Second edition. 201

Mechanical theory of the film-on-substrate-foil structure : curvature and overlay alignment in amorphous silicon thin-film devices fabricated on free-standing foil substrates

Flexible electronics will have inorganic devices grown at elevated temperatures on free-standing foil substrates. The thermal contraction mismatch between the substrate and the deposited device films, and the built-in stresses in these films, cause curving and a change in the in-plane dimensions of the workpiece. This change causes misalignment between the device layers. The thinner and more compliant the substrate, the larger the curvature and the misalignment. We model this situation with the theory of a bimetallic strip, which suggests that the misalignment can be minimized by tailoring the built-in stress introduced during film growth. Amorphous silicon thin-film transistors (a-Si:H TFTs) fabricated on stainless steel or polyimide (PI) (Kapton E®) foils need tensile built-in stress to compensate for the differential thermal contraction between the silicon films and the substrate. Experiments show that by varying the built-in stress in just one device layer, the gate silicon nitride (SiNx), one can reduce the misalignment between the source/drain and the gate levels from ∼400 parts-per-million to ∼100 parts-per-million

Approaches taken by South African advertisers to select and appoint advertising agencies

Pitch and industry guidelines play an important role in awarding advertising agency contracts, but agencies must take into account that not all advertisers will adhere to these guidelines. The exploratory research study on which this article reports provides insight into the appointment process and selection criteria applied during the appointment of advertising agencies. This article examines the views of 116 senior marketing executives in South Africa to determine typical decision processes followed when advertising agencies are appointed. Consideration is also given to the structural arrangements in place, the composition and size of buying centres, switching barriers that make it more diffi cult or costly for advertisers to change agencies and selection criteria used to appoint advertising agencies. Data were obtained by means of structured questionnaires administered via a web-based survey. The fi ndings provide advertisers with insights into procurement decisions and selection criteria and can also provide valuable insight to agencies with regard to buying decision approaches taken by advertisers. Insight into the size and composition of buying centres adds to agencies’ understanding of who to target during customer relationship-building initiatives. From an academic perspective, this research offers a better understanding of the organisational buying process and the importance of selection criteria within the South African context

The Perceived Contribution of the Practise of Strategic Marketing on the Performance of South African Companies

Abstract: Despite criticism that the marketing discipline has a diminished role and influence within academia and business, there is general agreement that strategic marketing practice could contribute to company performance. The focus of this article is on how South African companies implement key strategic marketing concepts in order to establish a pattern of organisational behaviour around strategic marketing practice. The perceived contribution of these practices on company performance is also established. The South African perspective provides new insight into the practice and compliance of marketers within the context of developing countries. Insight of 167 South African marketing executives, obtained by means of a quantitative survey, suggests that although most firms performed strategic marketing activities, they were less confident that they established a competitive advantage or customer insight from doing so. The relative importance of customer insight was demonstrated by the fact that it had a significant correlation with financial performance, whereas segment-based marketing activities did not. Merely ‘ticking the boxes’ and performing strategic marketing activities for the sake of it is thus not enough to improve financial performance

Individual differences in metabolomics: individualised responses and between-metabolite relationships

Many metabolomics studies aim to find ‘biomarkers’: sets of molecules that are consistently elevated or decreased upon experimental manipulation. Biological effects, however, often manifest themselves along a continuum of individual differences between the biological replicates in the experiment. Such differences are overlooked or even diminished by methods in standard use for metabolomics, although they may contain a wealth of information on the experiment. Properly understanding individual differences is crucial for generating knowledge in fields like personalised medicine, evolution and ecology. We propose to use simultaneous component analysis with individual differences constraints (SCA-IND), a data analysis method from psychology that focuses on these differences. This method constructs axes along the natural biochemical differences between biological replicates, comparable to principal components. The model may shed light on changes in the individual differences between experimental groups, but also on whether these differences correspond to, e.g., responders and non-responders or to distinct chemotypes. Moreover, SCA-IND reveals the individuals that respond most to a manipulation and are best suited for further experimentation. The method is illustrated by the analysis of individual differences in the metabolic response of cabbage plants to herbivory. The model reveals individual differences in the response to shoot herbivory, where two ‘response chemotypes’ may be identified. In the response to root herbivory the model shows that individual plants differ strongly in response dynamics. Thereby SCA-IND provides a hitherto unavailable view on the chemical diversity of the induced plant response, that greatly increases understanding of the system

On the Tractability of (k, i)-Coloring

In an undirected graph, a proper ( k, i )-coloring is an assign- ment of a set of k colors to each vertex such that any two adjacent vertices have at most i common colors. The ( k, i )-coloring problem is to compute the minimum number of colors required for a proper ( k, i )- coloring. This is a generalization of the classic graph colo ring problem. Majumdar et. al. [CALDAM 2017] studied this problem and show ed that the decision version of the ( k, i )-coloring problem is fixed parameter tractable (FPT) with tree-width as the parameter. They aske d if there exists an FPT algorithm with the size of the feedback vertex s et (FVS) as the parameter without using tree-width machinery. We ans wer this in positive by giving a parameterized algorithm with the size o f the FVS as the parameter. We also give a faster and simpler exact algo rithm for ( k, k − 1)-coloring, and make progress on the NP-completeness of sp ecific cases of ( k, i )-colorin