This thesis is a cross-cultural comparative study on media representations of older people in UK and Taiwanese TV advertisements. Three analytical approaches (content analysis, the constant comparative method and critical discourse analysis) were employed. The content analytical study in this thesis revealed that older people were still under-represented as suggested in existing literature. Role salience and visibility of older characters were greater in Taiwanese TV advertisements than in UK TV advertisements. Taiwanese older characters were more likely associated with family relationships and indoor/home contexts while UK older characters were more frequently depicted at outdoor and entertainment settings. Nine character types emerged in the constant comparative study to describe media representations of older people in UK and Taiwanese TV advertisements. They are "Competent", "Conservative/Traditional", "Engaged in Female-Male Relations", "Golden Ager", "Humorous", "Unwell and Declining Health", "Incompetent", "Engaged in Intergenerational Relations", and "Vulnerable". Results of the cross-cultural comparisons indicated that the Confucian tradition of filial piety was a defining factor that distinguished the portrayals of older adults in Taiwanese TV adverts from those in the UK TV adverts. The critical discourse analysis in this thesis focused on UK and Taiwanese TV adverts for over 50s life insurance products. It was found that a positive construction of ageing was commonly linked to consumer choices so as to legitimate the advertised products (targeting older people) in the two cultural contexts. However, the positive ageing was arguably offset by ageist ideological presuppositions behind the product messages which conventionally highlighted low cost, eligibility, medical exemption and free gifts both in the UK and Taiwanese data.

Adaptation and personalisation is aimed at improving the user experience in e-systems. Personalisation was initially applied in the fields of distance learning and web-based educational systems. Adaptation can be also used in e-advertising, to increase customer satisfaction and encourage repeat visits to websites. Several models/frameworks have been designed for adaptation, for instance AHAM, LAOS, AdRosa, and MyAds. Many systems have been developed based on these frameworks. Most previous models/frameworks were primarily designed for personalised educational experience and were aimed at standalone systems, which cannot be (easily) integrated into existing websites in a lightweight manner. In addition, some of them are used in the portal model of advertising, since they match the interests of the publisher and the advertiser. The aim of this work is to overcome the limitations and weaknesses of these models and systems to deliver adaptive advertising. This work firstly attempts to support and facilitate the integration between adaptive systems and business websites. It also introduces a method to control and adapt advertisements located and owned by businesses. This thesis further proposes a generalised model, the Layered Adaptive Advertising Integration (LAAI), as the starting point for the development of an adaptive advertisement system. In a second stage, it presents a study that assesses the effectiveness of a system (AEADS) based on this model, via a trial run of a model prototype with users (both customers and business owners). In a third stage, social networks are used as inputs for the user model of customers, to enhance the efficiency of acquiring user information, as an addition to the user registration process. Furthermore, social interactions, such as the facility to use “like”, are added to the user model, and the delivery process has the ability to apply actions based on this data. Finally, an evaluation of the whole system proposed is conducted, with business owners and Internet users alike.

Online advertising constitutes one of the main sources of revenue for the majority of businesses on the web. Online advertising inventory was traditionally traded via bilateral contracts between publishers and advertisers, vastly through a number of intermediaries. However, what caused an explosion in the volume and, consequently, the revenue of online ads was the incorporation of auctions as the major mechanism for trading sponsored search ads in all major search engines. This reduced transaction costs and allowed for the advertisement of small websites which constitute the majority of Internet traffic. Auction-based markets were harder to establish in the display advertising industry due to the higher volume of inventory and the pre-existence of traditional intermediaries, often leading to inefficiencies and lack of transparency. Nevertheless, this has recently changed with the introduction of the ad exchanges, centralized marketplaces for the allocation of display advertising inventory that support auctions and real-time bidding. The appearance of ad exchanges has also altered the market structure of both demand-side and supply side intermediaries which increasingly adopt auctions to perform their business operations. Hence, each time a user enters a publisher's website, the contracted ad exchange runs an auction among a number of demand-side intermediaries, each of which represents their interested advertisers and typically submits a bid by running a local auction among these advertisers. Against this background, within this thesis, we look both at the auction design problem of the ad exchange and the demand-side intermediaries as well as at the strategies to be adopted by advertisers. Specifically, we study the revenue and efficiency effects of the introduction and competition of the demand-side intermediaries in a single-item auction setting with independent private valuations. The introduction of these intermediaries constitutes a major issue for ad exchanges since they hide some of the demand from the ad exchange and hence can make a profit by pocketing the difference between what they receive from their advertisers and what they pay at the exchange. Ad exchanges were created to offer transparency to both sides of the market, so it is important to study the share of the revenue that intermediaries receive to justify their services offered given the competition they face by other such intermediaries. The existence of mediators is a well-known problem in other settings. For this reason, our formulation is general enough to encompass other areas where two levels of auctions arise, such as procurement auctions with subcontracting and auctions with colluding bidders. In more detail, we study the effects of the demand-side intermediaries' choice of auction for three widely used mechanisms, two variations of the second-price sealed-bid (known as Vickrey) auction, termed PRE and POST, and first-price sealed-bid (FPSB) auctions. We first look at a scenario with a finite number of intermediaries, each implementing the same mechanism, where we compare the profits attained for all stakeholders. We find that there cannot be a complete profit ranking of the three auctions: FPSB auctions yield higher expected profit for a small number of competing intermediaries, otherwise PRE auctions are better for the intermediaries. We also find that the ad exchange benefits from intermediaries implementing POST auctions. We then let demand-side intermediaries set reserve (or floor) prices, that are known to increase an auctioneer's expected revenue. For issues of analytical tractability, we only consider scenarios with two intermediaries but we also compare the two Vickrey variations in heterogeneous settings where one intermediary implements the first whereas the other implements the second variation. We find that intermediaries, in general, follow mixed reserve-price-setting strategies whose distributions are difficult to derive analytically. For this reason, we use the fictitious play algorithm to calculate approximate equilibria and numerically compare the revenue and efficiency of the three mechanisms for specific instances. We find that PRE seems to perform best in terms of attained profit but is less efficient than POST. Hence, the latter might be a better option for intermediaries in the long term. Finally, we extend the previous setting by letting advertisers strategically select one of the two intermediaries when the latter implement each of the two Vickrey variations. We analytically derive the advertisers' intermediary selection strategies in equilibrium. Given that, in some cases, these strategies are rather complex, we use again the fictitious play algorithm to numerically calculate the intermediaries' and the ad exchange's best responses for the same instances as before. We find that, when both intermediaries implement POST auctions, advertisers always select the low-reserve intermediary, otherwise they generally follow randomized strategies. Last, we find that the ad exchange benefits from intermediaries implementing the pre-award Vickrey variation compared to a setting with two heterogeneous Vickrey intermediary auctioneers, whereas the opposite is true for the intermediaries.

The art of personalised e-advertising relies on attracting the user‟s attention to the recommended product, as it relates to their taste, interest and data. Whilst in practice, companies attempt various forms of personalisation; research of personalised e-advertising is rare, and seldom routed on solid theory. Adaptive hypermedia (AH) techniques have contributed to the development of personalised tools for adaptive content delivery, mostly in the educational domain. This study explores the use of these theories and techniques in a specific field – adaptive e-advertisements. This is accomplished firstly by structuring a theoretical framework that roots adaptive hypermedia into the domain of e-advertising and then uses this theoretical framework as the base for implementing and evaluating an adaptive e-advertisement system called “MyAds”. The novelty of this approach relies on a systematic design and evaluation based on adaptive hypermedia taxonomy. In particular, this thesis uses a user centric methodology to design and evaluate the proposed approach. It also reports on evaluations that investigated users‟ opinions on the appropriate design of MyAds. Another set of evaluations reported on users‟ perceptions of the implemented system, allowing for a reflection on the users‟ acceptance level of e-advertising. The results from both implicit and explicit feedback indicated that users found the MyAds system acceptable and agreed that the implemented user modelling and AH features within the system contributed to achieving acceptance, within their e-advertisement experience due to the different personalisation methods.

The present dissertation investigates the role of television advertising in shaping the cultural values of the Italian society in the circular process of mirroring pre-existing societal values yet inducing new ones, thus contributing to its evolution. It questions its role within the society, its relationship with families, women and youngsters, the kind of language used in communicating, between 1957-1977, the age of Carosello programme. A corpus of two thousand five hundred television adverts was viewed and filed, of which a hundred were selected according to the more frequent themes, their cultural and semiotic relevance, and twenty-two analysed by a semiotic approach, together with some more considered alongside. Chapter One deals with methodology, an overview of the main concepts and tools of applied semiotics and the socio-semiotic perspective adopted. Chapter Two, then, contextualizes television advertising into its broader socio-cultural milieu and the history of television. The following three chapters analyze the selected adverts according to five main recurring themes: Chapter Three, the first steps of TV advertising, its auto-referentiality and its language; Chapter Four, the family and its inner relationships, the couple and the institution of marriage; Chapter Five women‘s emancipation, the new generation of youngsters and new myths. Commercials are analysed by shots and sequences from a narrative and visual perspective in search of their deep underlying generative values. The approach is a holistic one, adapting itself to the prevailing characteristics of every occurrence, although the peculiar nature of the ads of the period entails a prevailing narratological model. All findings are then connected together to identify the main semantic areas indicating cultural values present in the Italian society of the period. The end findings consist of a set of interesting cultural values identified. At first a self-assertiveness of advertising as a way to popularity; then its preferred mode of communication through verbal language rather than pictures; a representation of families according to either the patriarchal or the consumerist model; a fundamental disbelief in marriage and a sexist attitude to women‘s representation; finally, a mistrust in the values of the new generations. All of these eventually pointing to the main semantic area of tradition, an index to the fundamental conservative yet contradictory role of the Carosello adverting which, while contributing to preserve traditional values, it also tended to replace them with its only main consumerist value. At a higher level, on a socio-semiotic perspective it is the role of that semiosphere which, while drawing from society it also contributes in shaping it.