Barbara Miller, an assistant professor in the School of Communications, published research on marketplace advocacy in the autumn edition of Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly.
The study, “A Model of Public Response to Marketplace Advocacy,” examined how audiences negotiate marketplace advocacy messages, a form of public relations and/or advertising used by corporate interests to generate support for risk-related products, particularly those related to energy and the environment. Structural equation modeling using survey data was used to test a model of public response to this form of advocacy.
As public and media interest in energy and the environment has increased, marketplace advocacy campaigns may now represent a significant portion of all advocacy campaigns. The results indicate that audiences’ perceptions of trust in the message sponsor (the advertiser) and industry accountability (the sponsoring industry) led audiences to identify with the positive themes in the campaign and evaluate the information in the message less critically.
Janas Sinclair, assistant professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, coauthored the research.