Advertising complainants: who and where are they?

Journal of Marketing Communications

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Advertising complainants: who and where are they? Keith Crosier & B. Zafer Erdogan To cite this article: Keith Crosier & B. Zafer Erdogan (2001) Advertising complainants: who and where are they?, Journal of Marketing Communications, 7:2, 109-120, DOI: 10.1080/13527260121943 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13527260121943

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JOURNAL OF MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS 7 109–120 (2001)

Advertising complainants: who and where are they? KEITH CROSIER

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Department of Marketing, University of Strathclyde, Stenhouse Building, 173 Cathedral Street, Glasgow G4 0RQ, UK B. ZAFER ERDOGAN

Department of Marketing, I.I.B. Fakultesi, Dumlupinar University, Bilecik 11000, Turkey

A trend in images and messages that eventually cause offence was noted among signi cant international advertisers, accompanied by a steady increase in formal complaints over a 6-year period in the UK. Though the numbers are at present small, reanalysis of large-scale industry research reports suggested they are the tip of an iceberg consisting of many million potential complainants. If this latent activism reaches a critical mass, it will become a phenomenon that planners can no longer afford to ignore. Meanwhile, the literature on complaining behaviour has concentrated on the causes and responses rather than on the sources. Therefore, this study applied geographic and psychographic analysis techniques to postcodes accompanying over 50 000 complaints to the two main regulatory bodies in the UK, which were hitherto unavailable to independent researchers. A resulting index of complaints by location con rmed the intuitively logical assumption that it is characteristic of London and the south of England. A pro le of the complainants showed that they typically belong to a distinctive and relatively homogeneous social group of potential opinion leaders. Together, these outputs provide an original and unique template for minimizing the risk of longterm negative effects due to accidental provocation of an unintended audience. This is a media-strategy solution; the alternative would of course be to abandon potentially controversial creative strategies. KEYWORDS: Complainants; advertising; regulation; geo-demographics; planning INTRODUCTION While you are responsible to your clients for sales results, you are also responsible to consumers for the kind of advertising you bring into their homes. David Ogilvy (1968)

In response to inexorable developments in marketing communications technology, ‘media clutter’ and the globalization of products and markets, advertisers are putting their agencies under increasing pressure to produce what Broadbent (1997) called ‘accountable advertising’. Paradoxically, the last decade has seen a fashion among some prominent international advertisers Journal of Marketing Communications ISSN 1352–7266 print/ISSN 1466–4445 online © 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals


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for ‘transgressive’ campaigns (Falk, 1997, p. 64), which ‘use and subverting the system’ (Myers, 1999, p. 198). Commentators in the British trade press claim to have detected a tendency to ‘yobbish’ or ‘laddish’ advertising throughout the 1990s. The best-known international example of consistently provocative advertising is probably the series of images disseminated by Benetton during the 1990s via posters, magazines and their in-house sales promotion publications (Falk, 1997; Crosier et al., 1999; Mantle, 1999). One poster in the series precipitated more than 800 complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority in the UK in August 1991. The deliberately controversial approach of the in-house creative director was unequivocally supported by the company chairman until May 2000, when the former abruptly departed. The effect on their advertising strategy is keenly awaited. Two advertising agencies in the UK have produced a series of posters and magazine advertisements for French Connection UK that combine overtly sexual imagery with the logo ‘fcuk’, which has been registered as a trademark. In this case, the originator of the creative strategy was the founder of the company. In September 1999, 20 members of the new Scottish Parliament collectively complained to the Advertising Standards Authority about one poster that they considered ‘not only an insult to women, but . . . virtually an incitement to attack’ according to contemporary press reports. In the USA, Grant (1992) reported in a newspaper article that the highly respected academic Sidney Levy had described the Calvin Klein campaigns of that period as ‘avant-garde, [but] scandalous’ and the man himself as ‘someone who habitually tests the boundaries of what is acceptable with advertisements that violate taboos’. Birley (1999) argued that such courting of controversy and rationalizing of the outcome was a ‘short-term approach that does little for brand values’ (p. 30). Furthermore, a study by Keck and Mueller (1994) found that approximately one-third of all ‘unintended messages’ were ‘less than positive’. Thus, there is a distinct possibility that what Birley (1999) called ‘shock tactics’ will result in the long-term negative effects on brand and company which have been described elsewhere as ‘collateral damage’ (Crosier et al., 1999). Granted, advertising campaigns can become famous rather than notorious, but this paper is concerned with the planning implications of creative executions and media schedules that engender negative opinion in a meta-audience beyond the presumably sympathetic target audience. Reports in the trade press have suggested that those responsible for the tactics in question, when faced with evidence of potential collateral damage, have tended to bluster, put forward disingenuous post hoc justi cations, dig their toes in and in general aggravate the self-in icted injury. Indeed, there is a school of thought that favours controversial tactics in pursuit of publicity on the grounds that they can add considerable leverage to the cost-effectiveness of the marketing communications budget. For example, Club 18–30 and Wonderbra ‘can spend a tiny amount on posters, and get millions of pounds worth of free advertising as they are reproduced in press articles . . . each disapproving newspaper going to the trouble to reproduce the offending picture’ (Myers 1999, p. 198). To sustain this argument requires unquestioning acceptance of the cliché that all publicity is good publicity. In truth, advertising people’s public relations colleagues spend much of their time in ‘damage limitation’ exercises that have been necessitated by adverse publicity. The inescapable conclusion is that there is ‘a kind of complacency or certainly lack of passion about planning, particularly among new and younger planners’ (Rainey, 1997, p. 1). Advertisers who are not complacent can minimize collateral damage by revising their creative strategies, media strategies or both. However, case histories have suggested that the originators of the provocative creative approach are often powerful gures who succeed in resisting radical change. In that case, campaign planners could at least reduce the risk by revising their media

ADVERTISING COMPLAINANTS

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strategies so as to restrict accidental dissemination of the controversial images and messages to a potentially hostile and disruptive subset of the meta-audience. Accordingly, this paper reports on a study, which, for the rst time, provides media planners in the UK with a pro le of those potential activists. The sophisticated state of contemporary media selection software means that using those data in order to avoid media vehicles that reach such people is a relatively straightforward task. Thus, ‘accountability’ need not necessarily inhibit ‘creativity’.


FROM LATENT PREDISPOSITION TO ACTIVE COMPLAINING Table 1 presents a consolidated interpretation of two large-scale, industry-commissioned, independently executed eld surveys of representative adults throughout the UK. It presents ten separate indicators of latent activism, which are ranked in order of the strength of the evidence. The percentages in the original reports have been equated to the numbers of households on the assumption that each respondent was in effect stating a collective domestic attitude or opinion. On the one hand, fewer than one in ten out of 522 respondents chose advertising as one of ‘three or four’ items from a list of 12 ‘things which are part of British life’, which ‘you and your friends talk most about’, ‘you feel strongest about’ or ‘most need attention and change’ (Advertising Association, 1996, p. 4). Projected to the national population, this nding suggested that the meta-audience de ned earlier would contain fewer than 2 million households in which advertising was a spontaneously salient issue. On the other hand, as many as two-thirds of 1005 respondents had TABLE 1.

Estimating latent predisposition to complain

Evidence

Source

Complaint ever made

Advertising Standards Authority (1998) Advertising Association (1996) Advertising Association (1996) Advertising Association (1996) Advertising Association (1996) Advertising Association (1996) Advertising Standards Authority (1998) Advertising Standards Authority (1998) Advertising Standards Authority (1998) Advertising Standards Authority (1998)

Perceived need for change Strong feelings Spontaneous topic of conversion Disliking of advertisements Disapproval of advertising Recollection of being misled or offended Knowing who to complain to Finding advertising not generally acceptable Ever felt offended enough to consider complaining

% of survey respondents 1

Equivalent number of households 237 500

4.5

1 068 750

5

1 187 500

7

1 662 500

11

2 612 500

16

3 800 000

22

5 225 000

39

9 262 500

54

12 825 000

68

16 150 000

For sources and sample sizes see the text. Total number of households in Great Britain in March 1998 = 24 040 000 (Advertising Association, 1999).


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at one time or another ‘felt offended enough to consider complaining’ (Advertising Standards Authority, 1998, Tables Q12–15) and well over one-third knew the name of a body to which they could direct their complaint, p. 46. This admitted the possibility of up to 16 million potentially activist households. Whatever the actual level of predisposition to take direct action, the larger of the two surveys found that only 1% of the respondents, which corresponded to approximately 250 000 households, had ‘ever complained’ about any newspaper, magazine, cinema or poster advertisement (Advertising Standards Authority, 1998). Yet even that modest gure predicted almost ten times as many complaints as the 20 072 in fact received by the two main regulatory bodies together in the same year (Advertising Standards Authority, 1999a; Independent Television Commission, 1999). Figure 1, which was compiled from Advertising Standards Authority and Independent Television Commission annual reports over the 6 years to 1998, shows a shallow but steady upward trend over the 6-year period in the conversion of latent predispositions into actual complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority and Independent Television Commission, about a relatively constant number of broadcast and non-broadcast advertisements. Not all those complaints were in response to deliberately provocative creative tactics, which are the focus of this study. Analysis of Advertising Standards Authority and Independent Television Commission annual reports has shown that 35% of the 94 478 complaints over the same period of years were related to controversial images and messages (Advertising Standards Authority, 1999a; Independent Television Commission, 1999). The Advertising Standards Authority’s (1999b)

FIGURE 1. Trends in complaining. Sources: Advertising Standards Authority and Independent Television Commission annual reports.


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criterion of decency is that ‘advertisements should contain nothing that is likely to cause serious or widespread offence’ (Clause 5.1) and they added that they might be ‘distasteful’ even if those requirements were met; ‘responsibility to consumers and to society’ (Clause 5.2) was not explicitly de ned. The Independent Television Commission’s (1997) test for offensiveness is that ‘no advertisement may offend against good taste or decency or be offensive to public feeling and no advertisement should prejudice respect for human dignity’ (Clause 13).


THE LITERATURE Reviewing the substantial literature relating to ‘complaining behaviour’ revealed that it does not deal with the pro le of the complainants, but rather with the nature of the complaints (mainly directed at retailers by customers) and the recipients’ subsequent actions. Moreover, a recent authoritative review showed that interest in the topic suddenly waned 10 years ago (Stephens and Gwinner, 1998, p. 172). There is also a body of literature concerning the general issue of controversial advertising. For example, Boddewyn (1991) proposed that such ‘hard’ causes of controversy as the ‘deceptive character of advertisements’ and ‘proper substantiation of advertising claims’ should be distinguished from such ‘soft’ issues as ‘decency, taste, public opinion and social responsibility’. Our study is concerned with the latter, which he noted are ‘more dif cult to de ne and handle because they re ect a large variety of personally subjective, culturally related and historically changing values’ (p. 25). A eld study of shoppers in the USA by Barnes and Dotson (1990, p. 61) separated objections provoked by ‘offensive execution’ from those related to ‘offensive products’, noting that advertising planners have more control over the former dimension. The Benetton, French Connection and Calvin Klein cases reported earlier are all examples of advertising for intrinsically inoffensive products executed in a way that many people found offensive. It appears that, so far, only one study has examined the pro le of those who are offended. Alwitt and Prabhaker (1994) investigated the demography of members of a nationally representative household panel in the USA who professed to dislike television advertising, who in our terms are latent activists. Their conclusion was that ‘demographic characteristics alone cannot be used to identify dislikers’ (Alwitt and Prabhaker, 1994, p. 22–23). However, the sophistication of the demographic measures they used was far removed from the diagnostic potential of the research instrument used in our own study (see the Methodology section). RATIONALE FOR THE STUDY The practical likelihood of collateral damage depends crucially upon the predisposition to activism among accidentally addressed individuals beyond the target audience. As long as the media schedule includes such classic mass media as large poster sites, high-circulation magazines and (in cases other than those so far mentioned) television, that meta-audience is bound to be effectively a cross-section of the population at large. Though a few researchers still think of that as an inert and defenceless ‘admass’, modern theorists favour various models of ordinary people voluntarily engaging with advertising messages and images or choosing not to (e.g. Lannon and Cooper, 1983; Jones, 1990). Thus, the originators of controversial advertising are addressing what an industry research report has called ‘the ad- uent society’ (Leo Burnett Ltd, 1990). It is only one step from uency to dialogue, both positive and negative. The focus of the study reported here is on one particular form of activism: complaining to the

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Advertising Standards Authority and Independent Television Commission about advertisements that are found to be offensive. The role of these two bodies in the system for regulating British advertising is explained in Baker (1998, pp. 10, 15 and 128). It is surprising that ours should be the rst study of this aspect of audience behaviour in the UK, where a notable specialization in advertising agencies is the account planning discipline. This seeks to ‘make advertising better and more effective by introducing consumers and their attitudes into the advertising development process . . . providing an holistic understanding of consumers and brands, and the ways that they connect’ (Cooper, 1997, p. xv). Yet the practitioners’ handbook in which this statement is made contains no reference at all to public opinion, complaining behaviour or any of the regulatory bodies that receive complaints. Nor does a literature review titled The Longer and Broader Effects of Advertising’ published by the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (Baker, 1990). RESEARCH OBJECTIVE The general aim of the study reported here is to provide advertising agency planners and their clients with research-based planning information to supplant (or at least supplement) intuition and speculation about the accidental dissemination of potentially objectionable images and messages to a non-targeted meta-audience. In practice, it could thereby reduce the risk of collateral damage in future campaigns by minimizing such accidental communication ‘leakage’. The speci c objective was to construct geographic and psychographic pro les of complainants who wrote to the Advertising Standards Authority and Independent Television Commission over the period 1996–1998 with details of where they lived and what type of people they were. METHODOLOGY The rst step towards achievement of the research objective was made possible by access to postcodes accompanying formal complaints made to the Advertising Standards Authority and Independent Television Commission; this is the rst time that they had been made available beyond these respective organizations. These alphanumeric codes contain up to four elements (the ‘outward code’) separated by a space from three more elements (the ‘inward code’). They locate every UK household and all commercial premises within one of approximately 1.8 million ‘postcode units’, each consisting on average of 15 letterboxes. A more detailed explanation of the system can be found in Baker (1998, p. 203). Though postcodes thus identify clusters of addresses rather than individuals, the Advertising Standards Authority chose to ensure total anonymity for its complainants by releasing only the rst half, to the left of the space, whereas the Independent Television Commission provided them in full. The total data set of complete and incomplete codes thus available related to 53 198 complainants. In order to analyse their geographic distribution, a purpose-built conversion table was developed. Of cial tables and maps obtained from the of ce of Population Surveys, London Planning Advisory Committee and Royal Mail were cross-indexed by inspection. Crosier et al. (1999) gave a more complete explanation of this conversion process and presented the unique conversion table it produced. All outward codes were then allocated to one of the standard regions or to Greater London (except a few in Guernsey, Jersey or the Isle of Man, the populations of which could not be extracted from the available government statistics). That distribution was compared with an allocation of the total based on the resident population in each location: in short, actual was


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compared with expected. A standard computer package was used for generating a map showing the outcome. In order to build a psychographic pro le, MOSAIC analysis software was used (with permission) for allocating all complete postcodes to one of 52 social ‘types’. The underpinning logic of this commercial classi cation system and its competitors is that people de ne themselves by the relatively homogeneous ‘neighbourhoods’ in which they choose to live (Sleight, 1995). These are in turn described qualitatively by summarizing their make-up with respect to 87 variables. Our study was the rst time this technology has been applied to consumer activism in any context. The outcome was a pro le of the providers of the postcodes, which might variously be called ‘geodemographic’, ‘sociographic’, ‘psychographic’ or ‘lifestyle’. For the purposes of this study, we considered these terms to be effectively synonymous. RESEARCH FINDINGS

Where are the activists? The histograms superimposed on the map in Fig. 2 compare the expected incidence of complaining in key areas of the UK (pale bars) with the actual incidence found in the study (dark bars). They were derived from the raw data set out in Table 2. The geographical boundaries delineate the 11 standard statistical regions of the UK plus, detached, Greater London. The result is a geographical index of latent activism. There was a clear geographical bias in the propensity to complain to the Advertising Standards Authority and Independent Television Commission. The variation in height between the dark and pale bars unequivocally demonstrates that it re ects the notorious north–south socioeconomic divide in the UK. Actual complaining exceeded the expected volume in the south-east of the country, while the reverse held true in the north. The four locations in which the propensity to complain was highest were all south of a line from The Wash to the Bristol Channel and four of the ve in which it was lowest were more or less north of a line from the Humber to the Mersey. The latter included six of the eight of cially designated ‘conurbations’, the most densely populated metropolitan areas in the country.

Who are the activists? For the methodological reasons already explained, the psychographic pro le of activists presented here is only based on the 13 362 individuals who complained to the Independent Television Commission between 1996 and 1998. Table 3 shows that the lifestyle pro le of the complainants was distinctive to a signi cant degree. A cluster with an index above 120 consisted of career managers or professionals and those who were well-educated, well-off, older, exhibited some bohemian tendencies, identi ed with the chattering classes and who were likely to live in the suburbs or the country. A similar-sized cluster with an index of less than 50 painted an uncompromising picture of under-privilege. This pro le is entirely consistent with the evidence in Table 2 that the geographical areas with a low index of activism contain most of the nation’s big industrial conurbations. Since advertising, media planners routinely use MOSAIC for target audience identi cation, this pro le will permit advertisers pursuing provocative creative tactics with the opportunity of minimizing accidental exposure to potential activists.

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FIGURE 2. Geographic index of activism. Source: Table 2.

DISCUSSION Our ndings showed that approximately 250 000 households contained someone who had already made a formal complaint about an advertisement. That gure was ten times the number of complaints received over the period of the study by the Advertising Standards Authority and Independent Television Commission. Some of the discrepancy will be accounted for by memory of long-past actions and some by direct complaints to the media concerned or to other quasi-regulatory bodies, but we are left with a wide range of possibilities. Whatever the true volume of complaining, the data showed a slow but steady upward trend. The Advertising Standards Authority and Independent Television Commission data showed that over one-third of complaints were objections to being offended rather than being misled. The admittedly relatively small number of people who do complain constitutes an activist core in the meta-audience, which is a source of potential opinion leadership. We also identi ed a signi cant reservoir of latent activism. Though the salience of advertising is low and attitudes are not generally unfavourable, the one direct measure of predisposition available suggested that as many as 16 million UK households will one day make a formal complaint about an advertisement



TABLE 2.

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Geographical distribution of complainants 1996–1998

Location

All complaints

%

All households

%

South East London South West North West West Midlands Yorkshire and Humberside East Midlands Scotland East Anglia Wales North Total

11 299 9814 4363 4218 3482 2680 2614 2472 1928 1517 1424 45 811

24.7 21.4 9.5 9.2 7.6 5.9 5.7 5.4 4.2 3.3 3.1 100.0

4 482 806 2 973 751 2 021 869 2 612 194 2 125 933 2 077 920 1 689 763 2 147 902 890 266 1 173 467 1 289 579 23 485 450

19.1 12.7 8.6 11.1 9.1 8.8 7.2 9.1 3.8 5.0 5.5 100.0

The base was 53 148 postcodes provided by complainants in the 3-year period 1996–1998 minus those in Northern Ireland. Sources: the Advertising Standards Authority, Independent Television Commission and Estimates Unit of the Of ce for National Statistics. All locations except Greater London and South East are standard statistical regions. London is a government of cial region, the population of which has been subtracted from the standard statistical population of the South East for the purposes of this table.

TABLE 3.

Psychographic pro le of activists

High (more than 120)

Average (70–120)

Low (less than 70)

Mosaic type

Index

Mosaic type

Index

Mosaic type

Index

Chattering classes Clever capitalists Gentri ed villages Bohemian melting pot Corporate careerists Ageing professionals Bedsits and shop ats Studio singles Lowland agribusiness Pebble dash subtopia Maturing mortgagers Suburban mock Tudor Rising materialists Upland and small farms Small time business College and communal Rural disadvantage

189 183 168 168 166 162 145 140 136 133 132 131 129 128 126 123 123

Non-private housing Af uent blue collar Rural retirement mix Town centre singles Military bases Green belt expansion Bijou homemakers Market town mixture Pre-nuptial owners Tied/Tenant farmers Rejuvenated terraces Low-rise right to buy Nest making families 1930s industrial spec Aged owner occupiers High spending greys Better off council

120 111 111 109 109 107 104 100 100 99 95 88 84 79 77 71 70

Rootless renters Depopulated terraces Coop club and colliery Inner city towers Brand new areas Victorian tenements Low rise pensioners Elderly in own ats Low rise subsistence Problem families Smokestack shiftwork Sweatshop sharers Mid rise overspill Solo pensioners Families in the sky Small town industry Flats for the aged Graf tied ghettos

69 69 68 67 67 64 60 57 56 56 56 48 42 41 41 37 28 28

See the text for the source.

and already know how to do so. As existing activism is thereby augmented, limited opinion leadership will be transformed into increasing social pressure on the remainder of the metaaudience. The key issue is when the number of activists will reach a critical mass, as it were. This


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scenario is supported by anecdotal evidence that a ‘culture of complaining’ is developing in British society. This study devised a geographic index of activism and a psychographic pro le of activists. Together, they paint a clear picture of a social group not far removed from a mixture of university lecturers and the legendary ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’, living within 100 miles or so of London. Such people are indeed potentially effective opinion leaders. The provocative campaigns reported earlier all used the poster medium as the vehicle for delivering an allegedly targeted message to an allegedly tolerant audience. Since that medium is highly unselective in the audience it reaches, users have no right to be surprised when leakage to the meta-audience results in offence. If the intention is simply to gain leverage from ‘free’ publicity, it is to be hoped that a planner can present a persuasive rationale for risking long-term collateral damage. If not, more careful media planning is strongly indicated. However, the very decision to pursue a provocative creative strategy deserves second thoughts. On the one hand, this ‘soft’ element of campaign planning is particularly susceptible to subjective encoding by creative teams and, on the other, equally subjective deconstruction by audiences (see Boddewyn, 1991). In that case, one particular role of advertising agency planners becomes particularly important, namely the one often de ned as ‘being the eyes and ears of the target audience’. If no planners are involved in the process, someone must take this perspective. The Benetton and French Connection examples show the potential for collateral damage when creatives enjoy free rein. CONCLUSIONS To summarize, leakage of images and messages to a meta-audience can result in negative social pressure from in uential activists and consequent long-term collateral damage to an advertising campaign. If a potentially controversial creative strategy has been adopted, it is therefore important to develop a media strategy that minimizes accidental leakage. The ndings of this study provide campaign planners with a unique template for doing so. Our overall conclusions are that advertisers should act in the following ways: (1) Close the communications loop by proactively monitoring reactions in the meta-audience, which is a signi cant step beyond conventional ‘effectiveness measurement’. (2) Encourage creative teams to recognize the danger of confronting the meta-audience with material in dubious taste. (3) Make sure that media planners pursue strategies for minimizing leakage beyond the target market. (4) Reassure themselves that a planner, somewhere, is weighing any short-term bene t in breaking these rules against the long-term risk of collateral damage. Finally, we should acknowledge four methodological provisos to these conclusions. First, the Advertising Standards Authority and Independent Television Commission both received complainants from individuals who either gave no postcode or provided an invalid one. Nevertheless, the usable samples were 73.2 and 93.3% of their respective totals and the total data set analysed comprised more than 53 000 postcodes. Second, because the Advertising Standards Authority subset consisted of incomplete postcodes, the psychographic pro le had to be built from the Independent Television Commission data alone. However, the same four geographical areas exhibited the highest index of activism in both subsets, while the four with the lowest contained three in common. There is no logical reason to suspect that they would not be equally well


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matched on a psychographical basis. Third, neither subset was structured in a way that permitted separation of the 35% whose objection was to ‘soft’ executional aspects of the offending advertisements from those who complained about advertisements being misleading, dishonest or untruthful (see Barnes and Dotson, 1990; Boddewyn, 1991). However, there is no logical reason for expecting the two pro les to be signi cantly different. Fourth, formal complaining was adopted as an interim surrogate for all other indicators of activism until representative samples of the other categories in Table 1 can be similarly pro led. However, it seems likely that the lead provided by overt activists will be the catalyst in any future transformation of latent activism. On balance, we have con dence in the reliability of our ndings and the applicability of our conclusions.


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We gratefully acknowledge the cooperation of the late Frank Willis, director of advertising and sponsorship at the Independent Television Commission and Caroline Crawford, former director of communications at the Advertising Standards Authority, the permission of Experian Ltd to use their systems and data for geodemographic analysis, and the data processing expertise of Dr Tony Hernandez of the Centre for the Study of Commercial Activity at Ryerson Polytechnic University, Toronto, formerly of Manchester Metropolitan University. REFERENCES Advertising Association (1996) Public Attitudes to Advertising 1996. London: Advertising Association. Advertising Association (1999) Marketing Pocket Book 2000. Henley-on-Thames: NTC Publications, p. 22. Advertising Standards Authority (1998) Drawing the Line in 1998: A Survey into the Prevailing Standards of Taste and Decency in Non-broadcast Advertising. London: Advertising Standards Authority. Advertising Standards Authority (1999a) Annual Report 1998. London: Advertising Standards Authority. Advertising Standards Authority (1999b) The British Codes of Advertising and Sales Promotion. London: Advertising Authority. Alwitt, L.F. and Prabhaker, P.R. (1994) Identifying who dislikes television advertising: not by demographics alone. Journal of Advertising Research 34(6), 17–29. Baker, C. (ed.) (1990) The Longer and Broader Effects of Advertising. London: Institute of Practitioners in Advertising. Baker, M.J. (ed.) (1998) The Macmillan Dictionary of Marketing and Advertising, 3rd edn. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Barnes Jr, J.H. and Dotson, M.J. (1990) An exploratory investigation into the nature of offensive television advertising. Journal of Advertising 19(3), 61–9. Birley, H. (1999) Turning ads into talking points. Marketing 1 April, 29–30. Boddewyn, J.J. (1991) Controlling sex and decency in advertising around the world. Journal of Advertising 20(4), 25–35. Broadbent, S. (1997) Accountable Advertising: A Handbook for Managers and Analysts. Henley-on-Thames: Admap Publications. Cooper, A. (1997) Introduction. In A. Cooper (ed.) How to Plan Advertising, 2nd edn. London: Cassell, p. XV. Crosier, K., Hernandez, T., Mohabir-Collins, S. and Erdogan, B.Z. (1999) Assessing the risk of ‘collateral damage’ in advertising campaigns. Journal of Marketing Management 15(8), 837–55. Falk, P. (1997) The Benetton–Toscani effects: testing the limits of conventional advertising. In M. Nava et al. (eds) Buy This Book: Studies in Advertising and Consumption. London: Routledge, pp. 64–86. Grant, L. (1992) Can Calvin Klein escape? Los Angeles Times Magazine 23 February. Independent Television Commission (1997) The ITC Code of Advertising Standards and Practice. London: Independent Television Commission.


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Independent Television Commission (1999) Annual Report 1998. London: Independent Television Commission. Jones, J.P. (1990) Advertising: strong force or weak force? Two views an ocean apart. International Journal of Advertising 9, 233–46. Keck, G.L. and Mueller, B. (1994) Observations: intended vs. unintended messages. Journal of Advertising Research 34(2), 70–8. Lannon, J. and Cooper, P. (1983) Humanistic advertising: a holistic cultural perspective. International Journal of Advertising 2(3), 195–213. Leo Burnett Ltd (1990) The Ad- uent Society. London: Leo Burnett Ltd. Mantle, J. (1999) Benetton – the Family, the Business and the Brand. London: Little, Brown. Myers, G. (1999) Ad Worlds: Brands, Media, Audiences. London: Edward Arnold. Rainey, M.T. (1997) The planning context. In A. Cooper (ed.) How to Plan Advertising, 2nd edn. London: Cassell, p. 1–14. Sleight, P. (1995) Explaining geodemographics. Admap 30(1), 27–9. Stephens, N. and Gwinner, K.P. (1998) Why don’t some people complain? A cognitive–emotive process model of consumer complaint behavior. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science 26(3), 172–89.

BIOGRAPHIES Keith Crosier is honorary senior research fellow and former director of teaching in the Department of Marketing at the University of Strathclyde, UK. A scientist by training, with an MSc in management studies from Durham University Business School, he was an advertising manager in London and New York for 6 years. His current research interests are the sociology of marketing communications and the strategic planning process in the advertising business. B. Zafer Erdogan is an assistant professor in the Department of Marketing, Dumlupinar University, Turkey. He holds an MBA degree from the University of Hartford, USA and a PhD from the University of Strathclyde, UK. His current teaching and research interests are developments in marketing communications, branding, social marketing and research methods.