Ways of Seeing Advertising: Law and the Making of Visual Commercial Culture

This article examines the role of law in shaping visual commercial culture by telling the story of the hoarding—the outdoor advertising surface for posters—in the formative decades of mass advertising in Britain, from roughly 1840 to 1914. The hoarding emerged in this period as a distinct property and a focal point of contestation over ways of seeing. Its meaning as a visual environment hinged on questions, which are still resonant today, about the interaction between economic and aesthetic categories: advertising and art, capital and beauty, commerce and culture. Historical actors—among them the organized billposting trade, the National Society for Checking the Abuses of Public Advertising, a civil society organization that took up the cause of protecting public spaces from advertising, governmental and local lawmakers, and citizens—enlisted private and public legal means to respond to these questions. This analysis draws on an expansive interdisciplinary archive to trace them. As it shows, legal means were engaged in cultural demarcation or what Thomas Gieryn has aptly termed boundary work. In establishing cultural boundaries, law defined the terms on which advertising became an integral element of daily visual experience, at once omnipresent and derided. The legal history of advertising thus offers deep insights for visual legal studies.

Claims on Ready-to-Eat Cereals: Are Those With Claims Healthier?

Background: The use of advertising content strategies that suggest consuming a product will confer nutrient- and health-related benefits influences household food purchasing decisions, which increases consumption of energy-dense, nutrient-poor products. We examined the presence of marketing claims regarding nutrient content, health and nature in ready-to-eat (RTE) cereal packages in relation to the products' nutritional quality.Methods: A cross-sectional content analysis was conducted on 178 RTE cereal packages available in the six largest supermarket chains in four Colombian cities from August to November 2018. The nutritional quality of products was assessed through the nutrient profile model established by the Chilean Law of Food Labeling and Advertising law.Results: All products sampled exceeded the regulation threshold for at least one nutrient of concern (e.g., high-in calories and/or sugar). The majority (66.3%) of packages had claims related to nature, 57.3% had nutrient-content claims, and 15.7% had health benefit or risk avoidance claims. Most products with nature, nutrient-content, and health claims were high in energy (99.2, 98.0, and 92.9%, respectively) and sugar (88.1, 87.3, and 92.9%, respectively).Conclusion: RTE cereal products offered in major Colombian supermarket chains are heavily marketed using nutrition- and nature-related claims. Nearly all products with claims are high in energy and sugar, despite the messages conveyed by the claims to consumers. Results support the implementation of mandatory regulations restricting claims on food and beverage products high in nutrients of concern.

Is the Word "Consumer" Biasing Trademark Law?

Our trademark law uses the term “consumer” constantly, reflexively, and unconsciously to label the subject of its purpose—the purchasing public. According to the U.S. Supreme Court, trademark law has “a specialized mission: to help consumers identify goods and services they wish to purchase, as well as those they want to avoid.” As one leading commentator puts it, “trademarks are a property of consumers’ minds,” and “the consumer, we are led to believe, is the measure of all things in trademark law.” Much criticism has been rightly levied against trademark law’s treatment of the consumer as passive, ignorant, and gullible. For instance, consumers are seen as requiring protection from any and all marketplace confusion and have no standing to sue under the Lanham Act. However, that a contributing factor to such treatment could be the linguistic bias stemming from the law’s label of the buying public as mere consumers—rather than, for instance, “citizens,” “persons,” “individuals,” or “humans”—has not, until now, been directly addressed. This Article urges those involved in trademark and advertising law—e.g., judges, lawyers, lawmakers, and scholars—to rethink our ubiquitous use of the derogatory consumer label. To this end, the Article first explores “consumer” as a dehumanizing, anti-ecological, and nonsensical metaphor for “one that utilizes economic goods.” It then examines social psychology experiments finding that use of “consumer” has potentially deleterious effects for society given the negative stereotypes that it engenders as a social categorization. The Article claims, by extension, that the implicit linguistic bias inherent in consumer rhetoric might contribute to trademark law defining the public in a manner that is patronizing, biased, insulting, and indulgent of likelihood-of- confusion claims. The Article suggests that we either work to phase out the “consumer” label and replace it with more appropriate terminology (e.g., “citizen”), or at least pause to acknowledge the word’s potentially biasing effects.

Correction to: Consumption of non-nutritive sweeteners by pre-schoolers of the food and environment Chilean cohort (FECHIC) before the implementation of the Chilean food labelling and advertising law

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via the original article.

False Advertising Law

This chapter explores false advertising law. In the United States, false advertising law lives in statutes and regulations; it is enforced by federal agencies and state attorneys general; and its rules can seem designed more to promote consumer welfare and market efficiency than to enforce interpersonal obligations or compensate for wrongful losses. If one views the divide between public and private law as a fixed border between independent regions, false advertising law appears to fall in the domain of public law. The chapter’s working hypothesis is that that picture is a false one. Although it can be helpful to distinguish private from public law, the line between them is not so sharp. Laws that fall on the private side of the divide can be designed in light of purposes and principles commonly associated with public law, and vice versa. U.S. false advertising law provides an example. Despite the fact that it is commonly classified as public law, one can find in it structures, functions, and values commonly associated with private law. The structural features include horizontal duties, transfer remedies, private enforcement, and judge-made rules. False advertising law is unusual in that it imposes on advertisers one duty owed to two distinct categories of persons. The duty not to engage in deceptive advertising is owed both to consumers, who might be deceived by an advertisement, and to honest competitors, who might lose sales as a result of consumer deception.

Troubleshooting algorithms: A book review of Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil

Fact: we no longer control our lives, algorithms do. Mortgage-backed securities, college rankings, online advertising, law enforcement, human resources, credit lending, insurance, social media, politics, and consumer marketing; algorithms live within each one of these – collecting, segmenting, defining, and planting each one of us into arbitrary, unassailable buckets. The algorithms and the data that feed this process is what data scientist and international bestselling author, Cathy O’Neil, calls Weapons of Math Destruction (WMDs). In her captivating and frankly, bone-chilling account of the power amassed by algorithms, O’Neil sheds much needed light into the seemingly omnipotent world of destructive algorithms. Keywords: algorithms, algorithmic transparency, algorithmic bias, communications, public relations, ethics, data, predictive models

Digital advertising: regulations and challenges in Russia

Advertising on the Internet showed fascinating results in Russia in 2019 – according to the statistics of the Association of Communication Agencies of Russia (ACAR), the Internet was the only growing platform of advertising distribution, while such channels as TV, radio and printed media shortened their advertising profits. Along with growth of the online advertising market the interest and attention to legal aspects of digital advertising is increasing. Cases on digital advertising are always creative just like advertising itself is. The main challenges relate to the application of regular requirements of the advertising law, which are already well understood in the TV or radio business, to the Internet. While doing this, we in Russia also take into account international experience and trends in the field of digital advertising and try to predict further development of legal landscape and practice.