Imagine this scenario: after a long day of work, you settle in a train seat, rest your head against the window and close your eyes for a well-earned nap - only instead of the soothing clickety-clack vibrations…
A newsworthy event is happening right now. And another, and another — it never ends. This is vital not just for feeding our 24-hour news cycle and hungry media corporations, but increasingly also for marketers…
You can tell a lot about an organisation’s culture and view of the world by looking at what it says about its competitors. Some enterprises, just like some politicians and academics, are serene. They don’t…
RMIT professor Sinclair Davidson has recently defended the actions of journalist Paddy Manning, who was dismissed from Fairfax after writing an article in Crikey critical of what he called “advertorial…
Late last week, Facebook broke the news of another major change to users’ news feeds, sparking interesting discussion across the globe. Described by Mark Zuckerberg as your new “personal newspaper,” the…
The most recent guidelines on appropriate alcohol consumption from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) are a hard sell to a hard-drinking public. And this is despite growing concerns…
Merely two months into the new year and we have already seen a plethora of local and international efforts aimed at curbing what appears to be the inexorable rise of obesity. Some of these initiatives…
Two recent cases highlight the problem of misleading advertising. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has dismissed an appeal by POM Wonderful about health claims for their juice…
While we think of junk food marketing as something that happens during television commercial breaks or on massive billboard signs, supermarkets are yet another advertising frontier for food companies…
Body image may be the western world’s ugliest export. Images of thin, toned women and hyper-muscular men are conveyed via television, magazines, movies and the internet to the global market. The ideal…
The success of House Husbands, the Australian drama featuring four hands-on dads may be a signal that today’s fathers really want more involvement in their children’s lives than did previous generations…
Channel Nine is a station of two tales. The first is the positive story its viewers see: smiling in-house celebrities, reliable newsreaders, and blockbuster programs such as House Husbands, The Voice…
People around the world are worrying about their carbon footprint. But what about their furry friends’ carbon pawprints? Consider the numbers: there are currently around 1 billion pet cats and dogs worldwide…
With 5,459 attempted boat arrivals to Australia in the first half of 2012, an increase of 894 since last year, it is no wonder the prime minister is desperate to demonstrate she is combating people smuggling…
Imagine a world in which advertising companies were held directly accountable for the vision of the world their ads portrayed. Accountability could range from simple things like why deodorants don’t immediately…
Welcome to Some Sports Economics, a six-part video series explaining economic concepts through sport, by La Trobe University senior lecturer, Liam Lenten. In the fifth part of this series, Liam looks at…
Journalists have never been particularly fond of advertising or advertisers – to most journalists, advertising was space and time taken away from good stories and advertisers were commercial interests…
After languishing in an archive box at Melbourne University for more than 20 years, an astonishing piece of Australian political history has recently been dusted off and digitised. The university has unearthed…