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The study aims to investigate consumers' attitudes toward advertising by medical professionals, and how the attitudes vary among different demographic groups.

A survey using quota sampling was conducted. Altogether 1,297 adults aged 20 or above in Hong Kong filled in an online questionnaire in March 2012.

Consumers' attitudes toward advertising by medical professionals were in general favorable. Respondents reported that advertising by medical professionals provides consumers with information about the services and qualifications of practitioners. However, consumers were worried about misleading information in these advertisements. Respondents perceived strongly that advertising by medical professionals would lead to an increase in the price of services. Younger respondents and respondents with higher education were more sceptical toward advertising by medical professionals.

Medical professionals should put emphasis on providing consumers with relevant information of their services, expertise, and qualifications to assist consumers' information search. They should refrain from using price appeal.

This is the first study to examine consumers' attitudes toward advertising by medical professionals in a Chinese context.

The rise of social media marketing has brought significant implications for advertising industry and its organizations. The traditional role of advertising professionals had been changing from a clear identity to an unclear one. However, previous research has studied relatively little about advertising professionals’ roles and identities or how they may be changing in the social media marketing era. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A qualitative, interpretive approach was taken in this study. It involved 32 in-depth interviews with advertising professionals in advertising organizations differing in size, digital focus and ownership in different multinational full-service advertising organizations and digital organizations.

The findings indicated that the role of advertising professionals is innovating from a traditional “idea generator” to a “solution facilitator” in response to the social media marketing.

This study identified the key experiences of advertising professionals that they were found to have divergent role identities linked to their identification with traditional and digital organizations.

Many professionals abhor the thought of marketing their services. Marketing is assumed to be merely advertising and it is widely believed that advertising commercialises and hence demeans professional services (Chan, 1992; Darling and Hackett, 1978). Although restrictions on advertising have been removed or relaxed in a number of countries, many professionals and their associations still regard advertising with suspicion and regulate its use. This is perhaps nowhere more so than with medical professionals. A fundamental rule set by medical professional associations in European and North American countries is that the doctor's job is not a business. More explicitly, the Medical Council in Luxembourg specifies that medicine cannot be exercised ‘as a business’. While it is perfectly acceptable for other professions to declare that profit is the enterprise's driving force, such a statement would go completely against the professional conscience of the medical profession. Medical practitioners are expected to observe a high ethical code. Respect for life should come before any other consideration. However, the medical professional's ability to survive depends as much on marketing as on his specialised technical skills. A different marketing approach from that used conventionally in the business sector may be needed, but the utility of marketing cannot be denied. Like businesspersons, medical practitioners also network with their market by being active within the community. These and other actions all contribute to make the individual a well‐known figure within the area of his practice (Gelb, Smith and Gelb, 1988). Medical practitioners in the various countries frequently belong to national medical professional associations. These often have legal standing, and are empowered to issue regulations and sanction non compliance on many aspects relating to the profession including advertising. This study first aims to position within a North American and European perspective the approach to advertising adopted by the Malta Medical Council. Secondly, it seeks to empirically investigate (1) the attitude of Maltese medical practitioners towards advertising by their profession, and (2) the attitude of the Maltese general public towards advertising by medical practitioners. In America, the general public have been found to have a more positive attitude towards advertising than medical practitioners and professionals in general (Darling and Hackett, 1978; Dyer and Shimp, 1980; Miller and Waller, 1979). Similarly, we expect that in Malta medical practitioners will exhibit a more negative attitude towards advertising than the general public.

We explore factors that influence the circulation of client–service firm relationships between firms in the same market for professional services. Circulation refers to the dissolution of a client–service firm market tie and the formation of a new tie involving the same client but a new professional service firm. Building on research in social embeddedness and the structure of markets, we argue that the circulation of client–service firm relationships is affected by three social signals: the mobility of exchange managers between professional service firms, the size and market strategy of professional service firms, and the similarity of new service firms to clients’ previous exchange partners. Using data on advertising agency–client market ties, we find that client ties are more likely to circulate to large agencies, agencies with many market ties, and to agencies that are similar to a client's previous advertising agency. The circulation of client ties is also more likely when new agencies hire exchange managers from a client's previous agency. This effect is stronger when exchange managers circulate to agencies of equal or higher status as their previous employer. We discuss the implications of our findings for social embeddedness research and for the study of professional service firms.

The purpose os this article is to identify ecomical and cultural dimensions of responsible business conduct in the advertising industry. The article is based on an interview study with 15 leading experts in advertising agencies in Finland. A focus in these interviews was on how the phenomenon of responsible business is understood and reflected in the advertising industry. The focus in this article is to analyse the responsibilities of the advertising business, with special reference to the challenges that lie ahead for the profession.

The data were collected in focused interviews. The interviews were conducted with the managers of the five biggest advertising agencies in Finland: managing directors and managers or leading experts responsible for strategic planning and creative design. The aim was to find out how advertising professionals experience, interpret and value the social responsibilities of experts and businesses in the advertising industry.

Executives of advertising agencies consider it their prime responsibility to ensure the profitability of their clients as well as their own business. The emphasis is firmly on business targets and responsibilities, whereas other stakeholders are largely ignored and the other questions of social responsibility seem remote and alien. Advertising professionals are interested in social themes and concerns if they are central to their client companies' strategies. Agencies have not yet adopted the principles of responsible business as part of their everyday operation and strategic decision‐making.

The article shows what kind of stakeholders and related values and interests are involved in the advertising business and profession of advertising executives.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate an unexplored part of advertising history; namely, the education of a large, mundane, nonelite group of advertising professionals, so-called advertising technicians and the knowledge they acquired. Examining correspondence courses in the technology of advertising, we focus particularly on the production of technified knowledge and mass personas.

The study is based on a qualitative analysis of course material from Sweden’s two largest correspondence schools in the 1930s and 1940s. Two theoretical concepts guide the analysis: the concept of market devices and the notion of personas, both of which we use to show how the courses crafted a particular kind of advertising professional as well as knowledge.

The study shows that courses created a template-based persona of the advertising technician, who possessed what we call bounded originality characterized by diligence, modesty and rule-governed creative imagination. Similarly, the courses created a body of knowledge that was controllable and highly practice-oriented. The advertising technician was expected to embody and internalize the advertising knowledge, thus, becoming an extension of this knowledge on the market.

By directing the searchlight at the cadre of ordinary, middle-class advertising professionals instead of the high-profile “advertising creatives” and innovators, the paper brings to the foreground the nonelite level of the advertising industry. These practitioners went to work in the business world to produce the everyday advertising that was not necessarily groundbreaking but was needed in a growing mass-consumption society.

This article aims to explore the work lives and contributions of a group of women employed at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in the early twentieth century.

Archival source material from the J. Walter Thompson Company archives at Duke University includes personnel files, advertising campaign reports, and meeting minutes. The archival work is placed in historical context.

The J. Walter Thompson Women's Editorial Department played a significant role in the development of advertising and in furthering women's opportunities as advertising professionals.

Advertising was one of the few male‐dominated professions open to women in the early years of the twentieth century. An exploration of these women's work experiences greatly enhances our understanding of the field, of women's roles as advertisers, and of women's roles as consumers.

Suggests that an important source of attorney and accounting services information is the Yellow Pages phone book. Examines the information consumers want from Yellow Pages advertisements to help them select these services. Specifically, consumers want factual information regarding the type of law/accounting practiced, type of service offered, and contact information. Compares results of a consumer survey with the literature on the information that attorneys and accountants traditionally provide in other types of media. Provides suggestions on improving the Yellow Pages advertising of these service professionals.

The purpose of this study is to examine the attitude of accountants towards advertising and to investigate changes in attitude that may have occurred between 1993 and 2004.

Data were collected from accountants using a mail survey approach in 1993 and using an e‐mail survey approach in 2004. Questions on the two surveys were identical and a random sample of accountants was selected for each study. Statistical tests were used to compare responses from 1993 with responses in 2004.

Analysis of the results revealed significant positive shifts in the attitudes accountants have toward advertising of accounting services. Negative attitudes toward various aspects of advertising shifted to either a neutral or a positive position. This dramatic, positive shift in advertising attitudes by accountants occurred while skepticism towards advertising remained relatively high, overall, among the general public. Between the two time periods, changes in the use of various marketing tools (such as web sites to attract new clients) were also found to have occurred. In addition, the use of marketing professionals by accounting service providers increased substantially over the 11‐year time period of the longitudinal study.

Sample selection and size create some concern about generalizability of the study. With any random sample selection process, the view of the non‐respondents is not known nor whether those who responded tended to have a higher level of acceptance of advertising.

For marketing professionals, this shift to a more positive attitude by accountants provides opportunities to offer greater marketing and advertising services. This shift also signals an increasing awareness on the part of accountants to market their services.

The purpose of this paper is to map advertising agency practitioners' mental models of creativity.

A total of 30 in-depth interviews among top-level advertising agency executives (creative, account and planning directors) were conducted. Design and data analysis followed the grounded theory paradigm of qualitative research.

Complementing earlier studies in advertising creativity, a multi-dimensional system of practitioner mental models was discovered. Substantive models depict agency professionals' core understanding of advertising creativity and its dialectical structure. Developmental models conceptualise the intrapersonal acquisition of creative skill as well as the social context in which advertising creativity is generated. Effectiveness models introduce native explanations for the market effectiveness of creativity. Interrelationships between the identified models are presented in detail.

Understanding the mental models of advertising executives enriches the literature on the production side of marketing culture.

Shared understandings of mental models between advertising agencies and client brand management teams have the promise of reducing agency-client conflict.

The study's contribution is threefold: it provides an integrated view on advertising practitioners' multifaceted mental models about creativity (an area that has received little prior research attention); it models these mental models in their dynamic interaction, going beyond previous accounts that looked at topical areas in creativity in relative isolation; it redresses an imbalance in marketing theory between the production and consumption contexts of marketplace culture formation.