This Professional Report explores the effects of Tiffany&Co’s online advertising strategy on brand perception in Italy and United States. The study starts with an analysis of the concept of luxury and the opinion that scholars have on how luxury value and brand equity should be communicated. Brand perception, its influence on consumers, and the role of Internet are also analyzed. The last part includes a detailed analysis of the findings for Italian and American consumers aged 18-25 and the variables that influence Tiffany&Co’s perceptions. The study concludes with recommendations to reinforce brand equity and perceptions via online advertisements. / text

This thesis develops a framework to investigate and design novel optimization methods for two important problems: computational advertising (particularly, sponsored search) and wind farm turbine-layout planning. Whereas very different in specifics, both problems share some common abstractions. The existing solution in sponsored search is based on a greedy pay-per-click auction and is suitable only for advertisers seeking a direct response. It does not apply to advertisers who target certain numbers of clicks in a predefined time period. To address this new challenge, we introduce a unified optimization framework combining pay-per-click auctions and guaranteed delivery in sponsored search. Our new method maximizes the revenue of the search engine, targets a guaranteed number of ad clicks per campaign for advertisers willing to pay a premium, and enables keyword auctions for all others. Results combining revenue to the search engine and click rates for the advertisers show superior performance over strong baselines. The proposed framework is based on linear programming with delayed column generation for computational tractability at scale. We design a game theoretic approach to optimize the strategy for individual advertisers, i.e. to optimize their choices between auctions and guaranteed delivery, and analyze the behavior of the new market formed by our framework. Specifically, we introduce a new method for computing the approximate Nash equilibrium where an exact computation would prove computationally intractable. We rely on approximations of complex utility functions, a combination of simulated annealing and integer linear programming as our principled approach. Wind farm layout optimization is the selection of optimal locations for placement of large wind turbines taking into account factors such as topographical features, prevalent but non-constant wind direction and turbine-wake interference. Existing approaches are deficient in their inability to consider long distance turbine interference, changing wind speed and direction and multiple types of wind turbines in optimization. The dissertation develops an optimization framework based on a scalable divided-and-conquer strategy that enables scalability to real-world wind farm scales taking into account the aforementioned complexities in the optimization process. Essentially the process optimizes in a hierarchical manner at different levels of granularity. This hierarchical decomposition approach to optimization is common to both search-advertisement and wind-farm layout challenges.

With the surge of technological advancements in the 21st century, online advertising and marketing has transformed into a multi billion-dollar industry. Nowadays, it is very likely that a company’s success is dependent on the effectiveness of its online marketing strategy. When developing an advertising plan, companies must decide what their unique advertising needs are and use appropriate advertising formats that are most effective in achieving them. Unfortunately, companies often have very little guidance about how to choose modalities for specific advertising goals. The purpose of this paper is to examine the six most widely used online advertising modalities and the psychological frameworks that explain their effectiveness on developing positive brand attitudes among consumers. By doing so, a company would be better able to decide what kind of advertising modality would best fit their unique advertising needs. Using these findings, this paper develops a prescriptive model tailored for the specific advertising needs of one of the most widely known organizations in the world, the Professional Golfers’ Association.

Nos últimos anos, muitos blogs ganharam notoriedade e se tornaram referências em determinados nichos. Estes blogs atraem tanto a atenção do público assim como de empresas querendo desenvolver ações promocionais junto a esta audiência. Por outro lado, o desenvolvimento de serviços de publicidade online permitiu o surgimento de novos pequenos anunciantes, assim como novos pequenos veículos que dispostos a exibir anúncios. O objetivo deste trabalho é, portanto, compreender a profissionalização dos blogs brasileiros a partir de uma investigação sobre as dinâmicas promocionais na blogosfera. A pesquisa busca discutir a relação entre a cultura participativa (Jenkins, 2006b) da Internet, a virtualização da economia e o papel dos blogueiros neste contexto. Para tal, foi conduzido um estudo netnográfico que consistiu em: a) acompanhar os cem blogs brasileiros de maior autoridade do ranking do indexador Blogblogs, onde investigou-se a presença e o gerenciamento de publicidade e buscou-se outros indícios da profissionalização do meio; b) realizar uma observação participante no I Fórum de Mídias Digitais e Sociais FMDS e no BlogCamp Paraná. / In recent years, many blogs have gained notoriety and have become authorities in certain niches. These blogs attract both the attention of the public as well as companies aiming to develop promotional campaigns targeting blogs audience. Moreover, the development of online advertising services allows the emergence of new small advertisers, in addition to new small vehicles willing to display ads. Therefore, the objective of this study is to understand the professionalization of Brazilian blogs through an investigation of the promotional dynamics in the blogosphere. The research discusses the relationship between the participatory culture (Jenkins, 2006b) of the Internet, the virtualization of the economy and the role of bloggers in this context. In order to achieve this work's goals, a netnographic study was conducted and it consisted of: a) following the 100 most authoritative Brazilian blogs ranked in the Blogblogs index to investigate the presence and management of advertising and to find other evidences of the professionalization of the medium; b) conducting a participant observation in the I Digital and Social Media Forum (FMDS) and in the BlogCamp Paraná.

Nos últimos anos, muitos blogs ganharam notoriedade e se tornaram referências em determinados nichos. Estes blogs atraem tanto a atenção do público assim como de empresas querendo desenvolver ações promocionais junto a esta audiência. Por outro lado, o desenvolvimento de serviços de publicidade online permitiu o surgimento de novos pequenos anunciantes, assim como novos pequenos veículos que dispostos a exibir anúncios. O objetivo deste trabalho é, portanto, compreender a profissionalização dos blogs brasileiros a partir de uma investigação sobre as dinâmicas promocionais na blogosfera. A pesquisa busca discutir a relação entre a cultura participativa (Jenkins, 2006b) da Internet, a virtualização da economia e o papel dos blogueiros neste contexto. Para tal, foi conduzido um estudo netnográfico que consistiu em: a) acompanhar os cem blogs brasileiros de maior autoridade do ranking do indexador Blogblogs, onde investigou-se a presença e o gerenciamento de publicidade e buscou-se outros indícios da profissionalização do meio; b) realizar uma observação participante no I Fórum de Mídias Digitais e Sociais FMDS e no BlogCamp Paraná. / In recent years, many blogs have gained notoriety and have become authorities in certain niches. These blogs attract both the attention of the public as well as companies aiming to develop promotional campaigns targeting blogs audience. Moreover, the development of online advertising services allows the emergence of new small advertisers, in addition to new small vehicles willing to display ads. Therefore, the objective of this study is to understand the professionalization of Brazilian blogs through an investigation of the promotional dynamics in the blogosphere. The research discusses the relationship between the participatory culture (Jenkins, 2006b) of the Internet, the virtualization of the economy and the role of bloggers in this context. In order to achieve this work's goals, a netnographic study was conducted and it consisted of: a) following the 100 most authoritative Brazilian blogs ranked in the Blogblogs index to investigate the presence and management of advertising and to find other evidences of the professionalization of the medium; b) conducting a participant observation in the I Digital and Social Media Forum (FMDS) and in the BlogCamp Paraná.

Nos últimos anos, muitos blogs ganharam notoriedade e se tornaram referências em determinados nichos. Estes blogs atraem tanto a atenção do público assim como de empresas querendo desenvolver ações promocionais junto a esta audiência. Por outro lado, o desenvolvimento de serviços de publicidade online permitiu o surgimento de novos pequenos anunciantes, assim como novos pequenos veículos que dispostos a exibir anúncios. O objetivo deste trabalho é, portanto, compreender a profissionalização dos blogs brasileiros a partir de uma investigação sobre as dinâmicas promocionais na blogosfera. A pesquisa busca discutir a relação entre a cultura participativa (Jenkins, 2006b) da Internet, a virtualização da economia e o papel dos blogueiros neste contexto. Para tal, foi conduzido um estudo netnográfico que consistiu em: a) acompanhar os cem blogs brasileiros de maior autoridade do ranking do indexador Blogblogs, onde investigou-se a presença e o gerenciamento de publicidade e buscou-se outros indícios da profissionalização do meio; b) realizar uma observação participante no I Fórum de Mídias Digitais e Sociais FMDS e no BlogCamp Paraná. / In recent years, many blogs have gained notoriety and have become authorities in certain niches. These blogs attract both the attention of the public as well as companies aiming to develop promotional campaigns targeting blogs audience. Moreover, the development of online advertising services allows the emergence of new small advertisers, in addition to new small vehicles willing to display ads. Therefore, the objective of this study is to understand the professionalization of Brazilian blogs through an investigation of the promotional dynamics in the blogosphere. The research discusses the relationship between the participatory culture (Jenkins, 2006b) of the Internet, the virtualization of the economy and the role of bloggers in this context. In order to achieve this work's goals, a netnographic study was conducted and it consisted of: a) following the 100 most authoritative Brazilian blogs ranked in the Blogblogs index to investigate the presence and management of advertising and to find other evidences of the professionalization of the medium; b) conducting a participant observation in the I Digital and Social Media Forum (FMDS) and in the BlogCamp Paraná.

Advertising is the centre of numerous studies due to it central role in business, however it remains quite static amidst revolutionary consumer shifts towards digital consumption. While consumers are active online, advertising budgets are not being focused towards new media. This study uses structural equation modelling to show that marketers are acting as gatekeepers to investment, as their perceptions are affected by factors driven by external conditions, the influence of others, as well as their own internal beliefs and attitudes. Copyright / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2011. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

Marketers often target women because they represent over half of the population in Canada and Sweden and because they are the purchasing agents for 85% of household items. Advertisers and marketers use targeted marketing on Social Media platforms in the hopes of engaging the audience enough to initiate a purchasing action. For this paper the goal was to understand the relationship between women aged 55+ and their attitudes and perception of targeted advertising, to see whether it was effective in engaging them as consumers. Through interviews and the think-aloud method we found that while the overall perception of online advertising was negative, in practice, the ads on their social media feed were either accepted as relevant ads, simply ignored/not noticed, or not recognized as advertising. Finally we conclude that because social media gives users the impression that they are in control of the content on their feed, the consequences may be that targeted advertising can influence audience’s perception of who they are, more than they think.

The social media usage in this decade has seen a vast expansion, expansion that has been observed in the amount of time users spend on social media. This has provided ground for advertising within the media. Exploiting those opportunities, a number of advertisement tricks have been contrived and exercised with the intention of drawing the users’ attention and turning them into potential customers, although the effectiveness of these advertising has shown mixed results. Moreover there is an insufficient amount of scientific research within social media advertising, as well as the forms and effects of this form of advertising. The aim of this study is to identify and explain the main forms of social media advertising, acquire an understanding of the reasons behind the labeling, by the users, of these advertising techniques as irritating, as also, rank the tricks based on the irritation levels effectuated by them to the users. As a result the paper will provide a concentrated guide of social media advertising techniques, with positive and negative aspects of each type of trick and distinguish those tricks that effectuate the most consequential effects. To achieve this goal, a questionnaire was conducted and aimed to a demographic representing the majority of social media users and as a derivate the users that most frequently encounter social media advertising tricks. The results indicated an inclination towards advertisement that make use of celebrity personalities. The reasons and motivations that lead to this eventuality can be due to contempt, appreciation or practical post characteristics.

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to explore consumers’ attitudes towards native advertising and its perceived value. Design/methodology/approach – This research has a qualitative and exploratory nature. Forthe empirical material, primary data is collected through conducting in-depth semi-structured interviews. Findings – Consumers’ persuasion knowledge in relation to native advertising is found to be low. The advertising value of native advertising is positive since the consumers considered it to be entertaining, informative and credible. Furthermore, it was not considered as irritating which enhances the advertising value as well. Design was found to be its own category as it has an effect on all dimensions to enhance the advertising value. Since the advertising value is positive and enhanced, the attitudes of consumers towards native advertising are positive. Research implications/limitations – The main implications of this research are: native advertising can be used as a solution to consumers avoiding online advertising and in order for it to be successful, the design, content and frequency have to be taken into consideration. Since this research is qualitative, it has a subjective nature which might result in researcher induced bias. Furthermore, the age of the interviewees’ range from 21 to 38 years old which unlikely represents the whole population. Originality/value – As there is a lack of research in the field of native advertising, this research contributes to the field with knowledge about consumers’ attitudes towards it as well as how native advertising creates value. Additionally, the researchers applied the attitudes-towards-advertising model for this specific context and augmented it with a new dimension, design. This research also contributes with knowledge about each dimension in the native advertising context. Lastly, this research shows advertisers how native advertising should be used in terms of content, frequency and design.