Reapplication of Meadow's nonproduct advertising typology to 1996 nonproduct advertising

• Main Author: Baty, Chandra
• Other Authors: Ball State University. Dept. of Journalism.
• Format: Others
• Published: 2011
• Subjects: Industrial publicity.; Advertising.; Corporations > Public relations.; Corporate image.
• Online Access: http://cardinalscholar.bsu.edu/handle/handle/186046; http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1045634

In the 1970s, oil, gas and utility companies lost the American public's trust during the energy crisis. Faced with tighter government regulation, these companies turned to nonproduct advertising as a mouthpiece for the American company.At the time, Robert Meadow created a typology for nonproduct advertising by analyzing hundreds of nonproduct ads in several publications. According to Meadow, the ten categories that he created were the areas in which companies utilized nonproduct advertising.Yet, over twenty years later, companies in the 1990s confront many problems that plagued companies in the 1970s. However, the face of business has since changed. In contrast, global competition, equal employment opportunities and downsizing were not major issues twenty-seven years ago as they are today.Since Meadow published his typology of nonproduct advertising in 1981, no other typology has been put forth in nonproduct advertising literature. No one has compared his typology to current nonproduct ads in the 1990s to determine if there is a significant difference of the categories today as compared to Meadow's categories. Nor has any researcher questioned if the priority of the categories remains the same since his study was done. In addition, what types of organizations are using nonproduct ads today?Through a content analysis of nonproduct ads in the same publications that Meadow used, a significant difference was found in nonproduct ads of the 1990s in comparison to nonproduct ads in the 1970s. While image ads remained the largest used category of nonproduct ads for Meadow and the researcher's categories, none of the other categories ranked the same.According to the ranking of the categories, this study shows that the priority of the categories has changed since Meadow did his study. Findings also show that overwhelmingly, corporations remain the heaviest users of nonproduct ads while political use runs a distant second. === Department of Journalism