Billboard advertising is a vibrant and growing marketing communications medium, to which companies are increasingly turning for the purpose of attracting target audiences. The advertising medium has a lengthy history, often stated as dating back to ancient times, and possesses a series of advantages associated with its unique application along roadsides and other transit paths, positioned in an effort to attract the attention of passers-by. Despite its increasing popularity and use, billboard advertising has largely gone unnoticed by the academic community, with very few studies being recorded. In an effort to shed light on this scarcely studied medium, two studies were initiated in the USA, one targeting the patients of an urgent care clinic operation and the other hospital marketing executives. Survey questionnaires to each group measured their attitudes and perceptions associated with a range of topics pertaining to billboard advertising performance and policy matters. The results of this research effort indicate that a majority of both consumer and executive populations view billboards to be appropriate for marketing healthcare services. Both populations also were found to possess a positive overall opinion of the medium, indicating that billboards are perhaps not as controversial as they are sometimes characterised in the public policy literature. Consumers were found to view billboards as more capable across all of the stages of response hierarchy models, compared with marketing executives' views; however, a potential extension of the AIDA paradigm was identified within the latter data set, extending beyond action into reinforcement/retention. Simple informational elements are viewed both by consumers and executives to be most appropriate within billboard advertisements, and segmentation opportunities might exist, based not only on geography but also demography, best evidenced by differing receptiveness to billboards between black and white populations. While the findings presented in this research contain many new contributions to the literature of outdoor advertising, much more work is needed to address comprehensively this growing marketing communications category. It is hoped that the findings of this research will benefit the many stakeholders of billboard advertising and also prompt others, particularly in the academic community, to direct research efforts toward billboard advertising and other forms of outdoor advertising media.

The thesis aims to contribute to a critique of hegemonic consumerism and explores the ways in which its discourses are mediated through glossy magazine covers as constituted in, and constituting, public retail spaces (newsstands). The research is theoretically contextualised in two ways. Firstly, by locating the empirical research objects with regard to existing scholarship that addresses the magazine genre. Secondly, by exploring fundamental concepts invoked by those research objects: consumerism, consumption and commodities; publicity, public space and visual culture. Hinging on a theorisation of the public realm as a space of appearance, admiration and display, following Hannah Arendt (1958), a trio of dialectical frameworks are put forward as fundamental to framing an empirical exploration of consumer magazine covers/newsstands. These are: simulation/materiality, manipulation/empowerment and subject/object. Methodologically, the research employs a combination of social and semiotic methods, the former a participant observation and visual survey of nine newsstand sites, the latter an intertextual, multimodal discourse and visual analysis of a corpus of magazine cover texts sourced from those newsstands. A thick description of newsstand spaces roots the thesis in social context and intertextual milieu, provides insight into the shapes of consumerist discourse in public space, and underscores the detailed analysis of the formal elements of the magazine covers. The thesis makes a contribution to theories of consumerist aesthetics by filling in empirical detail to the theoretical dialectics outlined. As well as this, it provides an account of the material modalities of magazines covers, articulated as the mechanics of gloss, and shows how this contributes to the mediation of celebrity imagery. Further, it argues that consumerism relies upon three core textual strategies that combine to create a powerful form of mediation. The first is commercial heteroglossia, which is achieved through a visual celebration of commodity choice and a multiplicity of voices of sell. The second is a pornographic imagination, which is achieved through the exploitation of the eroticised gaze and commodification of the body, and a language of desire. The third is paper mirroring, which is achieved through the persistent invitation to self-imaging through the appeal of images of faces and verbal, individualising invitations to self-care and management.

It is argued that advertisements constitute a semiotic social resource. A communicative practice is realised using this resource which is part of the commercial function of advertising. However, this communicative practice is shown to be a limited meaning production. Advertising is theorised as a discursive social practice in which a communicative practice has become dominant. The discursive practice works ideologically, not simply communicatively or commercially. The ideological operation is understood as the address of social subjects in local historical situations. Advertisements present a unified position from which the text can be understood as communicative. That position is imbricated with representations constituted by the text, as the other of the ego The ego is imbricated with an order of discourse, which is a field of unevenly developed discursive practices. Through the overdetermination of the text in discursive social practice, the imbrications are hierarchised to construct representations of the 'real'. The 'real' is socially constituted. It is not a simple ontological priority. The institutional intentionality of marketing practice authorises the communicative practice. Thus, the authorised practice is enacted and resisted, or deconstructed, through a series of readings of advertisements from British magazines between 1956 and 1964. That period is considered to be one in which advertising was consolidated, both in corporate strategies and technologically in the public media. The deconstructive reading reinstates the discursive productions marginalised by the communicative practice. Advertisements are not simply reciprocal conversations freely developed between ego and other. Advertising as discourse is developed in the context of economic corporations' strategies. Advertisements encode, reiterate and constitute social subjects, through overdetermination, in relations of power. Ideologically, when formed as a communicative practice, advertisements join social subjects with an hegemonised order of power relations, which are realised in an extended social order in whose 'real' economic institutions are dominant.

How does a new medium create its audience? This study takes the business model of commercial media as its starting point and identifies industrial audience measurement as a constitutive operation in creating the sellable asset of advertisingfunded companies. The study employs a qualitative case study design to analyse how a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) company harnesses digital behavioural records generated by computational network infrastructure to turn network subscribers into an advertising audience product. The empirical evidence is based on a three-months intensive fieldwork at the company office. The analysis reveals comprehensiveness, openness and granularity as the historically new attributes of computational data vis-à-vis traditional audience measurement arrangements. These attributes are then juxtaposed with four kinds of business analytical operations (automatic data aggregation procedures, the use of software reporting tools, organizational reporting practices and custom analyses) observed at the research site to assess how does computational media environment rule key audiencemaking practices. Finally, the implications of this analytical infrastructure are reflected upon three sets of organizational practices. The theoretical framework for the analysis is composed by critically assessing constructivist approaches (SCOT, ANT and sociomateriality) for studying technology and by discussing an approach inspired by critical realism to overcome their limitations with respect to the objectives of the study. The findings contribute toward innovating new digital services, information systems (IS) theory and the study of media audiences. The case opens up considerable complexity involved in establishing a new kind of advertising audience and, more generally, a platform business. Sending out advertisements is easy compared to demonstrating that somebody is actually receiving them. The three computational attributes both extend and provide summative validity for mid-range theorizing on how computational objects mediate organizational practices and processes. Finally, the analysis reveals an interactive nature of digital audience stemming from the direct and immediate behavioural feedback in an audiencemaking cycle.

The aim of this research is to propose ways in which graphic designers can improve the design of commercial signage in Amman, Jordan. A survey of the effectiveness of recent signage regulation in the type and placement of commercial signage has led to the conclusion that regulations alone will not lead to improved quality in the production and siting of commercial signage without multi-stakeholder involvement and the dedicated training of those working in this field. There is a need for practitioners to develop specialised skills and knowledge in sign design, as opposed to applying only generalised graphic design techniques to sign production. Such skills include problem-solving, visual communication methods and competency in the application of the latest multi-media technology. It is proposed that by developing and incorporating sign-design competencies within the graphic design curriculum, practitioners will be better able to work effectively in this field. Following the investigation of the situation in Amman with respect to commercial signage, four related investigations were undertaken in order to formulate a list of recommendations which could be incorporated into an improved curriculum for teaching sign design. The first study investigated the problems caused by poorly designed and situated commercial signage in Amman. The second and third studies investigated urban signage solutions adopted by companies in other parts of the world, namely the global marketing of the McDonald’s brand and the corporate signage of Coventry University UK. The final study was a comparative investigation of graphic design education (with respect to sign design) in Jordan and the UK. Following these investigations, the Delphi technique was employed to elicit a set of 25 competencies for sign design learners, recommended by an expert panel of sign industry professionals and design academics. It is anticipated that the incorporation of such competencies will contribute to the improvements within the sign industry, as designers become better equipped for the task of sign design. Therefore it is anticipated that this research will contribute to the furthering of design practice by identifying the additional knowledge and competencies that graphic designers need to create appropriate commercial signs.