Turow, Joseph
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Communication
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Robert Lewis Shayon Professor of Communication
Introduction
Joseph Turow is Robert Lewis Shayon Professor of Communication at Penn's Annenberg School for Communication. • He is the author of more than 60 articles and 9 books on mass media industries. • His continuing work on the internet, marketing and society has received a great deal of attention from the popular press as well as the research community. • He has written about media in the popular press, including American Demographics magazine and The Los Angeles Times. • His research has received financial support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Kaiser Family Foundation, Federal Communications Communication, MacArthur Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities, among others. • The winner of a number of conference-paper and book awards, he was a Chancellor's Distinguished Lecturer at LSU and a Potruck Distinguished Lecturer at Penn State. • He currently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, Poetics, and New Media and Society.
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67 results
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Now showing 1 - 10 of 67
Publication Divided We Feel: Partisan Politics Drive American's Emotions Regarding Surveillance of Low-Income Populations(2018-04-01) Turow, Joseph; Akanbi, Ope; Hennessy, Michael; Virgilio, Diami; Draper, NoraPublication A Major Transformation(2006-01-01) Turow, JosephWe argue strenuously, strenuously against the naive sentimentalism on the part of companies that insist "We love all our customers and we love all our customers the same." -advertising executive quoted in Advertising Age, March 1995 [These customers] don't spend much money with you now/aren't big spenders in the category with your competitors and, for whatever reason, lack the capacity to increase consumption in your category in the future....If you can avoid recruiting them into your program from the beginning, do so. In many cases, however, until they have joined the program, you have no way of assessing their value....The goal is to starve them out of the program quietly but effectively. -loyalty consultant Richard Barlow, October 2000 When they were written, those comments were meant to be provocative, even controversial. Today, however, the reasoning they represent is conventional among marketers. At their most politically correct, they speak of a "customer-centric approach." In the words of one writer, "all employees of a company, from the CEO on down, must continually ask themselves what would they like if they were a customer of their company." But as the two quotations above suggest, cold winds of change are pushing executives toward tough decisions as to which customers really count and how to talk to them as personally and as customer-centrically as is practicable. Marketers increasingly use computer technologies to generate ever-more carefully defined consumer categories-or niches-that tag consumers as desirable or undesirable for their business. Increasingly, too, they use computer technologies to vary the content and the scheduling of messages they send to people in different niches.Publication Americans Reject Tailored Advertising and Three Activities That Enable It(2009-09-01) Turow, Joseph; Bleakley, Amy; King, Jennifer; Hennessy, Michael; Hoofnatle, Chris JayThis nationally representative telephone (wire-line and cell phone) survey explores Americans' opinions about behavioral targeting by marketers, a controversial issue currently before government policymakers. Behavioral targeting involves two types of activities: following users' actions and then tailoring advertisements for the users based on those actions. While privacy advocates have lambasted behavioral targeting for tracking and labeling people in ways they do not know or understand, marketers have defended the practice by insisting it gives Americans what they want: advertisements and other forms of content that are as relevant to their lives as possible. Contrary to what many marketers claim, most adult Americans (66%) do not want marketers to tailor advertisements to their interests. Moreover, when Americans are informed of three common ways that marketers gather data about people in order to tailor ads, even higher percentages - between 73% and 86% - say they would not want such advertising. Even among young adults, whom advertisers often portray as caring little about information privacy, more than half (55%) of 18-24 years-old do not want tailored advertising. And contrary to consistent assertions of marketers, young adults have as strong an aversion to being followed across websites and offline (for example, in stores) as do older adults. This survey finds that Americans want openness with marketers. If marketers want to continue to use various forms of behavioral targeting in their interactions with Americans, they must work with policymakers to open up the process so that individuals can learn exactly how their information is being collected and used, and then exercise control over their data. We offer specific proposals in this direction. An overarching one is for marketers to implement a regime of information respect toward the public rather than to treat them as objects from which they can take information in order to optimally persuade them.Publication Consumers’ Understanding of Privacy Rules in the Marketplace(2008-08-01) Turow, Joseph; Hennessy, Michael; Bleakley, AmyStudies suggest the general structure of Web sites leads consumers away from demanding that online merchants take certain approaches to privacy as a condition for dealing with them. This article presents findings from a nationally representative survey showing that the absence of such a privacy marketplace can also be attributed to the public’s incomplete knowledge of privacy regulations. Most respondents correctly understood that regulations regarding merchants’ sharing information are domain specific. The respondents were only sporadically correct, however, regarding which domains have which rules. The study raises questions about the best approaches to education in the absence of a coherent national policy of privacy regulation.Publication Family Boundaries, Commercialism, and the Internet: A Framework for Research(2001-01-01) Turow, JosephThis paper presents an information-boundaries perspective on the family and the Internet with the aim of helping to set the context for child development in the new media environment. Drawing from family studies, sociology, and communication, it lays out a model for viewing the family in relation to the Web. The paper draws research ideas out of the framework that center on four areas: family communication patterns; filters and monitors; information disclosure practices; and the Internet in the larger media context.Publication Curing Television's Ills: The Portrayal of Health Care(1985-10-01) Turow, Joseph; Coe, LisaContent analysis of TV programming across day- and night-time genres shows drugs and machines as the ubiquitous modes of healing, with doctors diagnosing incorrectly only three percent of the time.Publication AI Marketing as a Trojan Horse(2018-11-29) Turow, JosephPublication Internes Can't Take Money(2010-01-01) Turow, JosephPublication Hidden Conflicts and Journalistic Norms: The Case of Self-Coverage(1994-04-01) Turow, JosephBecause news and entertainment firms are increasingly under the same corporate umbrellas, it is likely that reporting by journalists on the cultural products and activities of their affiliated companies will rise. The theme of this study is that the phenomenon of reporting on one's own company is best understood through perspectives on goal conflict and organizational culture. The article argues the need to modify contemporary scholarly contentions that news firms expect open conflict between reporters and their superiors on policy issues. Interviews at two daily newspapers and Time magazine support the theoretically based proposition that investigation of their own organizations is very much an area where journalists draw away from confronting key professional conflicts. Centering on phenomena such as silent bargains and silent routines, the study suggests how conflicts about self-coverage are managed and how this conflict management is tied to larger dynamics of organizational control.Publication Advertising, Big Data, and the Clearance of the Public Realm: Marketers’ New Approaches to the Content Subsidy(2014-01-01) Couldry, Nick; Turow, JosephThis article addresses implications for democracy of two interconnected developments involving big data and the media. One is the targeting of consumers for advertising by marketers and the new data-capture industry that supports them. The other involves the transformation of advertisers’ approach to subsidizing media content production. We describe these developments and consider their consequences for democratic life, drawing on classical and recent democratic theory (Paine, Dahl, Mouffe, Rosanvallon). We conclude that big data’s embedding in personalized marketing and content production threatens the ecology of connections that link citizens and groups via information, argumentation, empathy, and celebration as members of a shared social and civic space. Unless challenged, these developments risk eliminating the connective media necessary for an effective democracy.