Research

New Media
 

 

Internet research, to date, is all too often focused on a singular moment in time. That is, the research published in leading mass communication journals present more of a series of snapshots of various issues involving the Internet. My research into this area indicates there are few, if any, articles dealing with the impact of the Internet over time.

Thus, it is my intent to establish a long-term analysis of the impact of online communications on a panel of subjects. I am, at present, constructing the research criteria and investigative plan. I hope to present this outline here very shortly. In the meantime, the bibliographic research presented at the August meeting of the Association of Educators in Journalism and Mass Communications will posted here very shortly.

 

Commercial Speech
 

 

Commerce exists in a less than perfect world. Were there perfection, the economic forces of the marketplace would be sufficient to reign in abuses that routinely distort -- to the detriment of consumers and business -- the distinction between competition and predation. Were there perfection in advertising, there would be little need to regulate the content to assure the fairness and truth of commercial messages.

In a less than perfect marketplace, therefore, governments have turned to regulation as a method of controlling abuse and, specifically, in the case of advertising, false claims and misleading content. Thompson and Jones define regulation as the imposition of rules by government with the power to levy penalties, within the context of modifying the economic behavior of businesses to the benefit of the common good. Such regulatory activity in the pursuit of veracity in advertising claims has been the purview of the Federal Trade Commission in the United States for most of this century. Thousands of cases have been adjudicated, settled, and otherwise disposed of by the FTC.

But action by the FTC is neither the only nor the most common regulatory activity over advertising in this country. Given that advertising is a conscious act that routinely requires planning and some degree of professional expertise, the companies who engage in commercial promotion have both control over the content of their advertising messages, as well as some interest in the accuracy of those messages. Indeed, in a period of limited resources, the consumer is faced with trusting advertising information as truthful. This may be the central core of self-regulation: advertisers know that consumers in most situations will match the product's attributes to those advertising claims that affected the consumer choice of that product. If the consumer's understanding of the advertising message and the consumer's evaluation of the product's attributes are asymmetrical to any significant degree, the consumer simply will not purchase the product a second time.

Thus, meeting consumer expectations can be assumed as a baseline for self-regulation by advertisers, an activity that is part -- to a greater of lesser degree -- of every advertising activity.

However, as Ivan Preston has argued, complex, unclear advertising messages, "puffery" -- advertising messages that are false, but not deceptive by law (such as "The Best"), and the almost constant barrage of commercial information, leaves consumers less capable of determining if the promise of the advertisement matches the truth of the product. Furthermore, as Priscilla LaBarbera notes, complex products are themselves difficult for consumers to understand.

Thus, the consumer -- and by extension, the advertiser -- needs help. The consumer's dilemma is apparent: false claims may result in disappointment, lost resources, or physical injury. The advertiser's need for advertising accuracy may be more subtle. Lack of truth in advertising may result in consumers reducing their dependence on advertising as a method of as certainly product attributes prior to product trial. As Joe Cappo, publisher of Advertising Age, has noted, consumers in the former Soviet Union had little faith in advertising because it was used by the government only to promote products that otherwise would not sell. Thus, Soviet consumers learned to equate advertising with shoddy products and to give little credence to claims including in those advertisements. Lack of faith in advertising places additional demands on the advertiser to drive consumer sampling of the product. That is, if consumers mistrust advertising, the advertise must find other methods to drive demand.

In addition, lack of standards may result in some advertisers enjoying a short-term advantage over others by utilizes misleading advertising. Thus, while most advertisers in a product category adhere to the "rules," the advertiser who uses misleading or false advertising can reap short-term rewards. These rewards will almost always be short-term -- if only because consumers will be able, in most cases, to ascertain the accuracy of the advertising claims after a single sampling (purchase) of the product. However, even short-term gains can be significant if the product is a high price point (such as contact lenses) or infrequent purchases (such as automobiles).

Advertisers may not be able to control the activity of the market itself. For example, when environmental claims were perceived as an important selling point for advertisers in the mid 1980s, there existed no standard for many of the terms, such as "biodegradable," or "earth friendly," or even "recycled." Industry, faced with some advertisers using the terms in ways that were misleading consumers, turned to government to establish definitions by which all advertisers could communicate product attributes within a level playing field.

 

Advertising
Self-regulation
 

 

The largest institutionalized effort by industry to self-regulate all commercial speech has been activities of the National Advertising Division (NAD) of the Council of Better Business Bureaus (CBBB). Established in 1971, the NAD has reviewed more than 2,000 cases and has been has been touted in trade and academic journals as the advertising industry's police force. This police force, it has been argued, is effective in two ways. First, it is suggested the NAD acts as an educational vehicle: advertising agencies and advertisers have learned what is acceptable in the area of comparative claims, for instance, through the efforts of the NAD. Second, the NAD is a sort of night guard, monitoring national advertising, without publicity and being seen during the "light of day."

How effective is the NAD? How does the NAD relate historically to government regulators and how has it evolved over the past 25 years? Just as important, how has the FTC reacted to the activity of the NAD? This study is both historic, analytic, as well as prescriptive. I will outline the 25-year history of the NAD, offering the most comprehensive look at this organization to date.

In addition, it is my first effort at describing a new model called agenda dynamics, a combination of traditional agenda setting and disjointed incrementalism. It is my hope that this new model will go very far at illuminating the mechanism present in agenda setting (or building) in the policy environment.



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