Broadcast Advertisements

Considers proposals to prohibit FCC from regulating length and periodicity of broadcast advertisements.

How often do we stop to recognize what pharmaceutical advertisements are telling us? Broadcast Pharmaceutical Advertising in the United States: Prime Time Pill Pushers engages with this question to include how pharmaceutical companies are shaping the meaning of drug interventions for individuals and the ways in which pharmaceutical advertisements frame issues of identity and representation for patients and health care. Such issues highlight how patients are being framed as consumers in these advertisements, which then permits the commodification of health care to be celebrated. Such a celebration has strong ideological implications, including definitions of “the good life,” patient agency, and the role of DTCAs in such depictions. By defining and discussing medicalization, pharmaceuticalization, and commodity fetishism, this book introduces how the term “pharmaceutical fetishism” can act as a means for describing the commodification of brand-name pharmaceutical drugs, which, via advertising and promotional culture, ignores large-scale production and for-profit motives of “big pharma.”

This fifth edition of the successful Promotion and Marketing for Broadcasting, Cable, and the Web, 4ed takes an important, timely look at the newest media venue, the Internet. Under its new title, Media Promotion and Marketing for Broadcast, Cable and the Internet, 5ed it takes a fresh look at the industry and the latest strategies for media promotion and marketing. The book explores the scope and goals of media production from the perspectives of network and local television, cable, Internet and radio, including public broadcasting. Topics include: goals of promotion; research in promotion; on-air, print, and Web message design; radio promotion; television network and station promotion and new campaigns; non-commercial radio and television promotion; cable marketing and promotion; research and budgeting for promotion; syndicated program marketing; global and international promotion and marketing; and online marketing and promotion.

Concern is growing about the effectiveness of television advertising regulation in the light of technological developments in the media. The current rapid growth of TV platforms in terrestrial, sattelite, and cable formats will soon move into digital transmission. These all offer opportunities for greater commercialization through advertising on media that have not previously been exploited. In democratic societies, there is a tension between freedom of speech rights and the harm that might be done to children through commercial messages. This book explores all of these issues and looks to the future in considering how effective codes of practice and regulation will develop.