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The purpose of this study is to understand the effect of increasing the intensity of sexual or violent content on consumer responses to online video advertisements, with a particular emphasis on sharing intentions.

The paper uses a between-subjects experimental design across two studies using new to the world online video advertisements as stimuli.

Study 1 finds that increasing the intensity of sexual and violent humor improves advertisement effectiveness amongst men but leads to significantly more negative attitudes toward the advertisement and brand amongst women. Study 2 identifies gender and humor type as moderators for sharing intentions in the presence of audience diversity. While men are more likely to publicly share sexual and violent humor advertisements, social anxiety mediates intentions to share sexual humor advertisements in the presence of greater audience diversity.

The paper offers insights to practitioners regarding the use of risqué forms of humor as part of a digital marketing strategy.

Drawing on and extending benign violation theory, the paper introduces and verifies a theoretical model for understanding consumer responses to the use of risqué forms of humor in online advertisements. It identifies how audience diversity affects sharing intentions for sexual and violent humor-based advertisements on social media.

In this article, we discuss an innovative audience research methodology developed for the AHRC-funded “Beyond the Multiplex: Audiences for Specialised Film in English Regions” project (BtM). The project combines a computational ontology with a mixed-methods approach drawn from both the social sciences and the humanities, enabling research to be conducted both at scale and in depth, producing complex relational analyses of audiences. BtM aims to understand how we might enable a wide range of audiences to participate in a more diverse film culture, and embrace the wealth of films beyond the mainstream in order to optimise the cultural value of engaging with less familiar films. BtM collects data through a three-wave survey of film audience members’ practices, semi-structured interviews and film-elicitation groups with audience members alongside interviews with policy and industry experts, and analyses of key policy and industry documents. Bringing each of these datasets together within our ontology enables us to map relationships between them across a variety of different concerns. For instance, how cultural engagement in general relates to engagement with specialised films; how different audiences access and/or share films across different platforms and venues; how their engagement with those films enables them to make meaning and generate value; and how all of this is shaped by national and regional policy, film industry practices, and the decisions of cultural intermediaries across the fields of film production, distribution and exhibition. Alongside our analyses, the ontology enables us to produce data visualisations and a suite of analytical tools for audience development studies that stakeholders can use, ensuring the research has impact beyond the academy. This paper sets out our methodology for developing the BtM ontology, so that others may adapt it and develop their own ontologies from mixed-methods empirical data in their studies of other knowledge domains.

This paper aims to explore how music festival organisers negotiate diversity and inclusion in marketing and promotion practices through symbolic and social boundaries.

Based on semi-structured interviews with 18 festival organisers in Rotterdam and participant observation with six festival photographers I show that symbolic and social boundaries are employed in three areas: (1) boundaries in festival format (i.e. [partially] free or ticketed), (2) boundaries in distribution partners and technologies and (3) boundaries in promotional content.

Symbolic and social boundaries are intentionally used by festival organisers to build and delineate festival audiences. Implications are drawn on current understandings of the accessibility of music festival spaces, arguing that festival research should move beyond within-space dynamics to grasp the negotiation of diversity and inclusion at festivals more fully.

While music festivals are often marketed as celebratory spaces that are “welcoming to everyone”, few studies have investigated diversity and inclusion nor marketing and promotion practices at music festivals. This study shows how festival audiences are shaped through marketing and promotion practices.

The purpose of this article is to investigate digital public spaces and audiences and to explore the relationship of digital public spaces to both ideas of nationhood and physical public institutions.

The article investigates tensions arising from the conjuncture of public spaces and digital culture through the lens of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). This research uses qualitative content analysis of a range of data sources including semi-structured interviews, primary texts and secondary texts.

The construction of the public library space as a digital entity does not attract anticipated audiences. Additionally, the national framing of the DPLA is not compatible with how audiences engage with digital public spaces.

Drawing on original, qualitative data, this article engages with the prevalent but undertheorized concept of digital public spaces. The article addresses unreflexive uses of the digital public and the assumptions connected to the imagined audiences for platforms like the DPLA.

This paper aims to investigate how the Japanese media conveyed the country’s foreign aid policy and analyse how framing biases in the news differ depending on which language (either Japanese or English) was used in the broadcasts.

This study uses a qualitative single case-study design and conducts a content analysis. The study uses news videos about the fifth Tokyo International Conference on African Development aired on YouTube by the Japanese media using Japanese and English.

The findings reveal subtle but notable differences in the patterns of the framing biases in the Japanese media’s news aired in Japanese intended for the domestic audience, and in the news on the same topic broadcast in English to the international audience.

The limitation of the study is the rather small data set used for the single case study of one event.

Framing biases could lead the general public in a monolingual society to a more skewed view of their government’s policy and its activities abroad. This could be an obstacle to developing a common ground for global issues and cross-border policy agendas.

The study explores an under-researched function of language in international affairs. It highlights how the mass media in a non-English-speaking country uses a dual approach to framing news while addressing different audiences. To the best of the author’s knowledge, the context that this paper deals with is novel because there are limited studies on the nexus between the influence of language choices and media logic in the field of international business.

This research examines the ways in which museums have utilised their Facebook platforms to communicate about climate and environmental-related challenges. The aim is to offer a snapshot of the phenomenon of museums as contributors to communicating climate-related topics and climate change education.

A content analysis of a purposeful sample of 10 museums’ Facebook postings was conducted. The study examines the themes and topics concerning climate issues that museums have posted and communicated about, the nature of the communication and an examination of responses from the audience.

This research reveals that not all museums in the study sample have communicated the different research-informed causes or contributors to climate challenges confronting societies today. There is also very little evidence of dialogic engagement with audience and the public-at-large. Most communication is still one-way focussing on the relaying of information.

This research highlights the roles of cultural heritage institutions such as museums in communicating climate change-related topics and the need to move towards a more dialogic mode of engagement with their audience. Museums have a role in serving as a trusted and inspirational space for public debates and community empowerment for dealing with climate challenges.

It is well known that culture is a catalyst for change, helping economies respond to societal problems and demands and that culture is where people turn to in moments of crisis. In this case study around designing and implementing evaluation methodologies/frameworks for Coventry UK City of Culture 2021, it is suggested that in English public policy and within publicly invested arts there is a maturation of thinking around recognising/measuring the public value of culture including its social value. The purpose of this paper is to chart the recent policy of justifying cultural expenditure with social value claims and highlight challenges for evaluating activity within Coventry UK CoC 2021 as a change in wider policy is taking place.

This paper provides creative insights into the design and implementation of the evaluation methodologies/frameworks for Coventry UK City of Culture 2021. The authors of this paper as the collective team undertaking the evaluation of Coventry's year as UK City of Culture 2021 bring first-hand experiences of challenges faced and the need for a cultural mega-event to evidence its value.

The case study aims to address the concepts of measuring value within cultural events and argues that a paradigm shift is occurring in methods and concepts for evidencing the aforementioned value.

The case study within this paper focuses on the build-up period to the UK City of Culture 2021 year and the thinking and logic behind the creation of the evaluation/measurement framework and therefore does not include findings from the actual cultural year.

It is acknowledged that there are papers examining measuring and evidencing the “value” of cultural mega-events, the authors bring real-life first-hand experience of the concepts being utilised by them on the ground in the delivery and evaluation design of Coventry, UK City of Culture 2021.

The purpose of this study is to examine the identification and collaboration rhetoric of the Norwegian government and public health authorities during the pandemic. The aim is to show whether and how actors use strategies and themes of identification, and whether they build identification with their publics.

The study combines qualitative and quantitative methods. Six identification strategies were identified through manual text analysis of press statements; word counts of each strategy were registered electronically to access quantitative data of individual actors.

The three strategies reflecting values, the two strategies reflecting division and disagreement and the strategy reflecting change showed almost equal frequencies. The strategy of shaping community, serving the function of change, and the division strategy, demonstrating identification through dissociation, were the most frequent strategies. Politicians preferred the collaboration strategy, while health experts preferred the strategy of concern and recognition.

The six identification strategies extend the understanding of leadership crisis communication and contemporary rhetoric as community-building discourse aiming for speaker–audience collaboration. The study demonstrates that division and disagreement are equally essential components of crisis communication as values and change. When actors differ in choice of strategy, themes and publics, they may still come across as coordinated and unified in their calls for solidarity, collective efforts and common understanding.

This study scrutinizes the convergence between commercial advertising and the political vision of social movement in media advertisements. This study deliberates how commercial advertisement could be compatible with movement discourses and social resistance. Such hybridization between commercial narration and movement discourses is different from political advertising sponsored by political and civic organizations. This study uses an advertising campaign in Hong Kong which expressed outcry against police search on an outspoken media as a case study to conceptualize advertising activism with the thematic analysis of the movement discourses shown in printed advertisements. This study aims to engage with scholarly dialogue surrounding social movement studies and discuss how movement discourses could hybridize with commercial advertisement.

This study examines the discourses and textual features of an advertising campaign initiated by the public instead of political elites and social movement organizations in Hong Kong, in which various individual citizens, anonymous participants, business enterprises and civic organizations expressed their anger over a police search against an outspoken media (Apple Daily) by Hong Kong police. This bottom-up advertising campaign shows how the narration of commercial advertising could be hybridized with the activism for social resistance, which is conceptualized as advertising activism in this paper.

Based on the textual features and discourses embedded in the advertisements, this study investigates the printed advertisements mushroomed in Apple Daily since the police search in August 2020 by the thematic analysis under the concept of advertising activism: frame construction, identities mobilization and decentered solidarity. Advertising activism differs from commercial and political advertising from two ways. Firstly, its advertisements are cosponsored by numerous nonpolitically well-known individuals or organizations. Secondly, advertising activism feature with hybridization between commercial narration and political or movement discourses. Discourses of advertising activism aim to mobilize the commercial identity of consumers for noncommercial means by their consumption behaviors.

The findings illustrate a hybridization of commercial narration and movement discourses stemming from social movement and identity politics, which is coined by our conceptualization of advertising activism. While commercial and political advertising focus on business promotion and political messages, respectively, advertising activism demonstrates multiple layers of cultural meanings on the consumption behaviors which hybridize with political and movement discourses. The authors hope this study could unleash further intellectual dialogue on the social role of advertising in social movement and how movement discourses “spillover” from social events to the commercial advertisement.

The study of sustainability within universities is recognized as essential for debates and research; in the long term, the “sustainable university” concepts can contribute to sustainability from a larger perspective. This study aims to propose a conceptual model for evaluating the students’ sustainability considering their interactions with the university and the environment. The proposed model is titled Sunshine model. It is applied to students of the La Salle University, Peru.

The model combines academic performance, happiness and the ecological footprint to quantify university students’ sustainability. A structured questionnaire survey was elaborated and applied to get the raw data that feeds the three methods. The students’ average grades evaluate academic performance. Happiness is quantified by the happiness index method, and the ecological footprint is measured by the demand for food, paper, electricity, transport and built-up areas. Results are evaluated under both approaches, overall group performance and clusters.

The proposed model avoids misleading interpretations of a single indicator or discussions on sustainability that lack a conceptual model, bringing robustness in assessing students’ sustainability in universities. To have a low ecological footprint, the student needs to need up to 1 planet for their lifestyle, be considered happy with at least 0.8 (of 1) for happiness index, and have good academic performance with at least a grade of 7 (of 10) in their course. Regarding the case study, La Salle students show a high academic grade degree of 7, a high level for happiness index of 0.8 and low performance for ecological footprint by demanding 1.8 Earth planets, resulting in an “environmentally distracted” overall classification for students with 2019 data. From a cluster approach, 81% of evaluated students (n = 603) have low performance for ecological footprint, whereas 31% have low performance for indicators of recreational activities of happiness. Changing lifestyles and making more recreational activities available play crucial roles in achieving higher sustainability for the La Salle students.

The happiness assessment questionnaire can be subject to criticism, as it was created as a specific method for this type of audience based on existing questionnaires in the literature. Although it can be seen as an important approach for diagnoses, the proposed model does not consider the cause–effect aspect. The decision-maker must consider the sociocultural aspects before implementing plan actions.

University managers can better understand why university students have high or low sustainability performance and provide more effective actions toward higher levels of students’ sustainability.

The proposed model, Sunshine model, overcomes the single-criteria existing tools that access the sustainability of universities. Rather than focusing on university infrastructure, the proposed model focuses on the students and their relationship with the university.