A very conscientious brand: A case study of the BBC's current affairs series Panorama

The reputation of British current affairs and documentary series such as the BBC's Panorama, Channel 4’s Dispatches or the now defunct Granada series World in Action have rested on an image of conscientious ‘public service’. These popular, long running series have, at various points in their history, acted as the ‘conscience of the nation’, seeking to expose social injustice, investigate misdemeanours by the powerful and take on venal or corrupt vested interest. The BBC’s flagship current affairs series Panorama is Britain’s longest running television programme and, according to the Panorama website, ‘the world’s longest running investigative TV show’. It has provided a template for other current affairs series both in Britain, Europe and around the world while undergoing several transformations in form and style since its launch in 1953, the latest and arguably most dramatic being in 2007. This article will chart the development of Panorama as a distinctive, ‘flagship' current affairs series over six decades. It will attempt to answer why the Panorama brand has survived so long, while so many other notable current affairs series have not. Using research and material from Bournemouth University’s Panorama Archive, the Video Active website, the BFI and other European archives this article explores the development of an iconic current affairs series that has, at different stages in its history, proved a template for other news and current affairs programmes. Various breaks and continuities are highlighted in Panorama’s history and identity, and an attempt will be made to characterise and specify the Panorama ‘brand’ and pinpoint the series’ successes and failures in reinventing itself in a rapidly changing media context

Why do consumers trust online travel websites? Drivers and outcomes of consumer trust toward online travel websites

Egypt is currently one of the leading nations especially in the Middle East region with a well-established e-commerce environment and advanced IT infrastructure, but rapid growth of e-commerce will soon occur in other nations with similar consumption patterns. This study tests a model of antecedents (consumer experience, propensity to trust, reputation, perceived website size, ease of use, perceived usefulness, and website quality) and consequences of consumers’ trust toward online travel websites. Trust is expected to predict consumer attitude, perceived risk, and intention to purchase travel online. Data of 1,431 users of online travel websites were selected from the Supreme Council of Universities Database–Egypt (SCU) and analyzed through structural equation modeling. The findings show that all the aforementioned factors with the exception of consumer experience influence consumer trust toward online travel websites. Trust influences consumers’ attitude, perceived risk, and intention to purchase travel online

Advertising Bans and the Substitutability of Online and Offline Advertising

The authors examine whether the growth of the Internet has reduced the effectiveness of government regulation of advertising. They combine nonexperimental variation in local regulation of offline alcohol advertising with data from field tests that randomized exposure to online advertising for 275 different online advertising campaigns to 61,580 people. The results show that people are 8% less likely to say that they will purchase an alcoholic beverage in states that have alcohol advertising bans compared with states that do not. For consumers exposed to online advertising, this gap narrows to 3%. There are similar effects for four changes in local offline alcohol advertising restrictions when advertising effectiveness is observed both before and after the change. The effect of online advertising is disproportionately high for new products and for products with low awareness in places that have bans. This suggests that online advertising could reduce the effectiveness of attempts to regulate offline advertising channels because online advertising substitutes for (rather than complements) offline advertising.Google (Firm)WPP (Firm

Modeling, Identification and Control at Telemark University College

Master studies in process automation started in 1989 at what soon became Telemark University College, and the 20 year anniversary marks the start of our own PhD degree in Process, Energy and Automation Engineering. The paper gives an overview of research activities related to control engineering at Department of Electrical Engineering, Information Technology and Cybernetics

Customized products and cloud service information system development research

This study presents a cloud service customized product information system to enable businesses to provide customized product marketing on the Internet to meet consumer demand for customized products. The cloud service of the information system development strategic framework proposed in this study contains three elements: (1) e-commerce services, (2) promotion type modules, and (3) cloud services customized promotional products. In this study, a mining cloud information system to detect customer behavior is proposed. The association rules from relational database design are utilized to mine consumer behavior to generate cross-selling proposals for customer products and marketing for a retailing mall in Taiwan. The study is composed of several parts, as follows. A market segment and application of association rules in data exploration techniques (Association Rule Mining) and sequence-like exploration (Sequential Pattern Mining), efficient analysis of customers, consumer behavior, identification of candidates for promotional products, and using cloud service delivery and evaluation of targets to evaluate candidates for promotional products for production. However, in addition to cloud service customized promotional products, the quantity of promotional products sales varies for different customers. We strive to achieve increased customer loyalty and profits through the use of active cloud service customized promotional products