Informing, implying or directing? Testing the effects of message sidedness, conclusiveness and their interaction in national and local Google Ads campaigns

PurposeThis study aims to apply and test the effectiveness of message sidedness and conclusiveness in Google Ads advertising.Design/methodology/approachFour field experiments on Google Ad campaigns were conducted on the topics of energy and environment, the water–energy–food nexus, and a Higher-Ed program (at the national and local levels).FindingsTwo-sided search engine advertisements are more effective than one-sided advertisements in national campaigns but less effective in local campaigns. In national campaigns, conclusive search engine advertisements are more effective in increasing impressions and clicks, but inconclusive advertisements are more effective in increasing the click-through rate (CTR); in local campaigns, inconclusive advertisements are more effective when being one-sided, while conclusive advertisements are more effective when being two-sided. Overall, the two-sided and inconclusive advertisement generates the best results in a national campaign, but the one-sided and inconclusive advertisement generates the best results in a local campaign.Originality/valueAs the first to test sidedness and conclusiveness with Google Ads advertising, the paper provides theoretical and practical suggestions to search engine marketers by identifying the effective copywriting strategies, moderating factors and more measurements of effectiveness.

Local preferences and the allocation of attention in equity-based crowdfunding

This study examines drivers of investment probability in equity-based crowdfunding using a hand-collected and comprehensive data set from a well-established platform. The analysis confirms several effects that have been reported in the recent literature on other crowdfunding markets. Extending recent research, we study moderators of local preferences of investors. Novel to the literature, we find that (1) local preferences are more pronounced in campaigns of younger ventures, (2) herding-like behaviour is stronger in local campaigns and (3) local investors are more responsive to updates posted by entrepreneurs, compared to non-locals. Our results suggest that investors allocate more attention to campaigns for which they have information advantages, such as local campaigns, due to their limited capacity to process information. Such behaviour may eventually amplify information asymmetry and local preferences. Our findings have practical implications for entrepreneurs, investors and platforms.

Triple Wins?

This chapter examines global energy politics, tracing the uneven rise and fall of enthusiasm for biofuels and for fracking. With a focus on the major players for each energy technology (Brazil, the US, and the EU for biofuels; the US for fracking), the chapter documents parallel trajectories for the fuels that later landed in Kenya’s Tana delta and the Yukon territory. In each case, champions of these fuels pointed to their potential contributions to achieving climate goals, enhancing rural economies, and diversifying national energy supplies. However, as production and extraction expanded, critics expressed mounting concern about the consequences of these fuels on the climate, water resources, and biodiversity, food prices, land rights, and community well-being. With attention to competing interests and geopolitical relations, local sovereignty and corporate power, and strategic discourses and scientific uncertainty, the chapter sets the stage for the local campaigns that emerged in Kenya and the Yukon.

Uprooting Identity: European Integration, Political Realignment and the Wine of the Languedoc, 1984–2014

Uprooting productive vines transformed the landscape of the wine growing Languedoc as part of a coordinated European effort to reduce agricultural overproduction, most notably after 1984. The demographic shifts caused by this transformation upset regional political alliances, coinciding with a socialist presidency and electoral gains for the far-right Front National (FN). More traditional syndical bodies lost their ability to accent national change, floundering in the face of supra-national reform. This left space for political parties to politicise this gap between agency and power, and the FN retooled regional rhetoric emerging from wine protests on the left in service of local campaigns. Contextualising the election of Robert Ménard in Béziers in 2014, this article looks at how sectoral and economic transformation was passed over in favour of populist language borrowed from the vineyards only decades earlier, in which the uprooting of vines explains the perceived uprooting of identity.

Selling culture: a buy local campaigns in the Ghanaian and South African textile and clothing industries

Purpose This paper aims to examine the paradoxes of buy local campaigns. These are popular strategies for marketing products in domestic markets aimed at supporting the local economy. Their scope can be national, regional, community or sectoral (such as agriculture, tourism, clothing or textiles). Design/methodology/approach This paper examines the paradoxes associated with these campaigns, using two cases and a mixed methods study of buy local campaigns in the Ghanaian and South African textiles and clothing industries. Findings The study found that both economic and cultural streams of the two campaigns have different outcomes and that the dominance of one aspect does not directly influence the other. Practical implications The use of buy local campaigns by countries as an intervention for reclaiming domestic market spaces can produce contradictory outcomes concurrently in the same campaign. Originality/value The author concludes with a brief discussion, which spells out the anatomy of buy local campaigns and the usefulness of the different aspects of these campaigns.

Washington Hotline

ALA leads national #eBooksForAll campaignAccess to digital content has long been a sore spot for libraries. When Macmillan Publishers announced an eight-week embargo on new eBook titles sold to libraries, the public outcry was extraordinary. In response, ALA launched the #eBooksForAll petition campaign at the Digital Book World conference in September. Coverage of libraries proliferated in news outlets across the country as more and more library systems led their own local campaigns to oppose Macmillan’s new policy. Just days before the embargo took effect on November 1, 2019, ALA hand delivered more than 160,000 signatures to CEO John Sargent.

Rape as Racial Injustice

This chapter examines activists in the black freedom movement who politicized the connection between rape and racism in their fight for justice. These activists argued that rape law and the entire legal system served to uphold white supremacy. Black men almost exclusively faced the death penalty for interracial rape, and black women victims saw little to no justice in the aftermath of white male sexual violence against them. In response, activists launched local campaigns nationwide in defense of black women victims, demanding justice. Likewise, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund pursued the abolition of the death penalty in their defense of convicted black rapists. In calling attention to the injustices faced by black men, some lawyers and activists also engaged the trope of the lying white woman. This was one of the strategies employed in Maryland’s infamous Giles v. Johnson case. In defending both black victims and accused black assailants, lawyers and activists exposed the racial injustices embedded in rape laws and their application. However, activists’ formulation of rape as racist oppression failed to engage a politics of rape that included black female victims of intraracial rape. This ultimately limited the scope of the movement.

Building a Nationalist Base in Rural India

The third chapter shows how the methods that Gandhi developed in South Africa were applied in practice in three movements in rural India that occurred in the second decade of the twentieth century. The chapter starts with a struggle in Bijoliya in princely India that had nothing to do with Gandhi initially. This brings out how such resistance was already being developed in popular local campaigns, showing how in time they linked up with Gandhi and began to apply a more strict and principled form of nonviolence. The other two struggles – in Champaran and Kheda – were led directly by Gandhi. Although the author has written already on the Kheda Satyagraha of 1918 in his1981 book Peasant Nationalists of Gujarat, he treats the topic in a new way here, focusing on its importance in the history of nonviolent struggle.

Heaping blame on shame: ‘Weaponising stigma’ for neoliberal times

The focus of this article is the ‘weaponising’ of stigma in the neoliberal era. The article starts with a brief characterisation of the sociological literature on stigma before moving to characterise post-1970s financial capitalism, focusing on relations of class and command. It then examines (a) the distinctions between enacted and felt stigma (involving norms of shame) and enacted and felt deviance (involving norms of blame), and (b) the novel neoliberal dialectic between these two sets of norms. This critical exposition provides a platform for a sociological rethink. A case is made that the significance of stigma and deviance as defined here can only be grasped sociologically in terms of the prime macro-mechanism of financial capitalism, the class/command dynamic, and the interaction of relations of stigma and deviance with other social relations, most notably those of (class-based) exploitation, deriving from the possession of capital, and (command or state-based) oppression, deriving from the possession of power. This case is constructed via a consideration of changing policies in relation to disability, drawing on UK data but with a wider reference. The final part of the article addresses modes of resistance to the roles of capital and power in dictating the neoliberal dialectic of shame and blame. It is argued that effective resistance depends on the formation of alliances across and between diverse ‘movement activities’. Expanding on the author’s work with David Kelleher, it is suggested that there exists a plethora of ‘resistance activities’, ranging from specific and/or local campaigns to transnational, class, feminist and ethnic insurrections. What this adds up to is a strategy of ‘permanent reform’. It is argued that the effective execution of this strategy presupposes a structural shift away from neoliberal ideology, the narrative of austerity and post-1970s financial capitalism. The potential effectiveness of the strategy of permanent reform is appraised, again, with reference to disability policy and practice.

Trends in ethnocentrism of Romanian consumers and their attitudes towards the marketplace

This paper investigates Romanian consumer ethnocentrism and the Romanian consumers’ attitudes towards local products and towards campaigns promoting local products. The research was conducted through a questionnaire addressed to a sample containing two groups of respondents. The sample was organized also into two groups: Millennials (consumers aged between 15 and 34 years old) and Non-Millennials (35-over 65 years old). It was tested the hypothesis that Millennials are less ethnocentric compared to the Millennials. Another hypothesis of the research consists of the fact that the Millennials consumers’ attitudes towards local products and towards local campaigns promoting local products show lower scores in comparison with the consumers belonging to the other group. The obtained results of this research highlight the following: there are not significant differences between the two groups regarding the level of ethnocentrism and their attitudes towards consumption of local products and campaigns promoting local products, however Millennials show more interest to the products that offer the best value for money whether they are done or not in Romania in comparison with Non-Millennials. The Romanian consumers would also like that the state and the industry involve more in supporting the local products.