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Advertising complainants: who andwhere are they?Keith Crosier & B. Zafer ErdoganPublished online: 09 Dec 2010.

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Advertising complainants:who and where are they?

KEITH CROSIERDepartment of Marketing, University of Strathclyde, Stenhouse Building, 173 Cathedral Street,Glasgow G4 0RQ, UK

B. ZAFER ERDOGANDepartment of Marketing, I.I.B. Fakultesi, Dumlupinar University, Bilecik 11000, Turkey

A trend in images and messages that eventually cause offence was noted amongsigni� cant international advertisers, accompanied by a steady increase in formal com-plaints over a 6-year period in the UK. Though the numbers are at present small,reanalysis of large-scale industry research reports suggested they are the tip of an icebergconsisting of many million potential complainants. If this latent activism reaches acritical mass, it will become a phenomenon that planners can no longer afford to ignore.Meanwhile, the literature on complaining behaviour has concentrated on the causesand responses rather than on the sources. Therefore, this study applied geographic andpsychographic analysis techniques to postcodes accompanying over 50 000 complaintsto the two main regulatory bodies in the UK, which were hitherto unavailable toindependent researchers. A resulting index of complaints by location con� rmedthe intuitively logical assumption that it is characteristic of London and the south ofEngland. A pro� le of the complainants showed that they typically belong to a distinctiveand relatively homogeneous social group of potential opinion leaders. Together, theseoutputs provide an original and unique template for minimizing the risk of long-term negative effects due to accidental provocation of an unintended audience. This isa media-strategy solution; the alternative would of course be to abandon potentiallycontroversial creative strategies.

KEYWORDS: Complainants; advertising; regulation; geo-demographics; planning

INTRODUCTION

While you are responsible to your clients for sales results, you are also responsible to consumers for thekind of advertising you bring into their homes.

David Ogilvy (1968)

In response to inexorable developments in marketing communications technology, ‘mediaclutter’ and the globalization of products and markets, advertisers are putting their agenciesunder increasing pressure to produce what Broadbent (1997) called ‘accountable advertising’.Paradoxically, the last decade has seen a fashion among some prominent international advertisers

JOURNAL OF MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS 7 109–120 (2001)

Journal of Marketing CommunicationsISSN 1352–7266 print/ISSN 1466–4445 online © 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd

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for ‘transgressive’ campaigns (Falk, 1997, p. 64), which ‘use and subverting the system’ (Myers, 1999,p. 198). Commentators in the British trade press claim to have detected a tendency to ‘yobbish’ or‘laddish’ advertising throughout the 1990s.

The best-known international example of consistently provocative advertising is probably theseries of images disseminated by Benetton during the 1990s via posters, magazines and theirin-house sales promotion publications (Falk, 1997; Crosier et al., 1999; Mantle, 1999). One posterin the series precipitated more than 800 complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority inthe UK in August 1991. The deliberately controversial approach of the in-house creative directorwas unequivocally supported by the company chairman until May 2000, when the former abruptlydeparted. The effect on their advertising strategy is keenly awaited.

Two advertising agencies in the UK have produced a series of posters and magazine advertise-ments for French Connection UK that combine overtly sexual imagery with the logo ‘fcuk’,which has been registered as a trademark. In this case, the originator of the creative strategy wasthe founder of the company. In September 1999, 20 members of the new Scottish Parliamentcollectively complained to the Advertising Standards Authority about one poster that they con-sidered ‘not only an insult to women, but . . . virtually an incitement to attack’ according tocontemporary press reports.

In the USA, Grant (1992) reported in a newspaper article that the highly respected academicSidney Levy had described the Calvin Klein campaigns of that period as ‘avant-garde, [but]scandalous’ and the man himself as ‘someone who habitually tests the boundaries of what isacceptable with advertisements that violate taboos’.

Birley (1999) argued that such courting of controversy and rationalizing of the outcome was a‘short-term approach that does little for brand values’ (p. 30). Furthermore, a study by Keck andMueller (1994) found that approximately one-third of all ‘unintended messages’ were ‘less thanpositive’. Thus, there is a distinct possibility that what Birley (1999) called ‘shock tactics’ will resultin the long-term negative effects on brand and company which have been described elsewhere as‘collateral damage’ (Crosier et al., 1999). Granted, advertising campaigns can become famous ratherthan notorious, but this paper is concerned with the planning implications of creative executionsand media schedules that engender negative opinion in a meta-audience beyond the presumablysympathetic target audience.

Reports in the trade press have suggested that those responsible for the tactics in question,when faced with evidence of potential collateral damage, have tended to bluster, put forwarddisingenuous post hoc justi� cations, dig their toes in and in general aggravate the self-in� icted injury.Indeed, there is a school of thought that favours controversial tactics in pursuit of publicity on thegrounds that they can add considerable leverage to the cost-effectiveness of the marketing com-munications budget. For example, Club 18–30 and Wonderbra ‘can spend a tiny amount on posters,and get millions of pounds worth of free advertising as they are reproduced in press articles . . . eachdisapproving newspaper going to the trouble to reproduce the offending picture’ (Myers 1999,p. 198). To sustain this argument requires unquestioning acceptance of the cliché that all publicityis good publicity. In truth, advertising people’s public relations colleagues spend much of their timein ‘damage limitation’ exercises that have been necessitated by adverse publicity. The inescapableconclusion is that there is ‘a kind of complacency or certainly lack of passion about planning,particularly among new and younger planners’ (Rainey, 1997, p. 1).

Advertisers who are not complacent can minimize collateral damage by revising their creativestrategies, media strategies or both. However, case histories have suggested that the originators ofthe provocative creative approach are often powerful � gures who succeed in resisting radicalchange. In that case, campaign planners could at least reduce the risk by revising their media

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strategies so as to restrict accidental dissemination of the controversial images and messages to apotentially hostile and disruptive subset of the meta-audience. Accordingly, this paper reports on astudy, which, for the � rst time, provides media planners in the UK with a pro� le of those potentialactivists. The sophisticated state of contemporary media selection software means that using thosedata in order to avoid media vehicles that reach such people is a relatively straightforward task. Thus,‘accountability’ need not necessarily inhibit ‘creativity’.

FROM LATENT PREDISPOSITION TO ACTIVE COMPLAINING

Table 1 presents a consolidated interpretation of two large-scale, industry-commissioned, inde-pendently executed � eld surveys of representative adults throughout the UK. It presents tenseparate indicators of latent activism, which are ranked in order of the strength of the evidence. Thepercentages in the original reports have been equated to the numbers of households on theassumption that each respondent was in effect stating a collective domestic attitude or opinion.

On the one hand, fewer than one in ten out of 522 respondents chose advertising as one of ‘threeor four’ items from a list of 12 ‘things which are part of British life’, which ‘you and your friendstalk most about’, ‘you feel strongest about’ or ‘most need attention and change’ (AdvertisingAssociation, 1996, p. 4). Projected to the national population, this � nding suggested that themeta-audience de� ned earlier would contain fewer than 2 million households in which advertisingwas a spontaneously salient issue. On the other hand, as many as two-thirds of 1005 respondents had

TABLE 1. Estimating latent predisposition to complain

% of survey Equivalent numberEvidence Source respondents of households

Complaint ever made Advertising StandardsAuthority (1998)

1 237 500

Perceived need for change Advertising Association(1996)

4.5 1 068 750

Strong feelings Advertising Association(1996)

5 1 187 500

Spontaneous topic of conversion Advertising Association(1996)

7 1 662 500

Disliking of advertisements Advertising Association(1996)

11 2 612 500

Disapproval of advertising Advertising Association(1996)

16 3 800 000

Recollection of being misled oroffended

Advertising StandardsAuthority (1998)

22 5 225 000

Knowing who to complain to Advertising StandardsAuthority (1998)

39 9 262 500

Finding advertising not generallyacceptable

Advertising StandardsAuthority (1998)

54 12 825 000

Ever felt offended enough toconsider complaining

Advertising StandardsAuthority (1998)

68 16 150 000

For sources and sample sizes see the text.Total number of households in Great Britain in March 1998 = 24 040 000 (Advertising Association, 1999).

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at one time or another ‘felt offended enough to consider complaining’ (Advertising StandardsAuthority, 1998, Tables Q12–15) and well over one-third knew the name of a body to which theycould direct their complaint, p. 46. This admitted the possibility of up to 16 million potentiallyactivist households.

Whatever the actual level of predisposition to take direct action, the larger of the two surveysfound that only 1% of the respondents, which corresponded to approximately 250 000 house-holds, had ‘ever complained’ about any newspaper, magazine, cinema or poster advertisement(Advertising Standards Authority, 1998). Yet even that modest � gure predicted almost ten timesas many complaints as the 20 072 in fact received by the two main regulatory bodies togetherin the same year (Advertising Standards Authority, 1999a; Independent Television Commission,1999).

Figure 1, which was compiled from Advertising Standards Authority and IndependentTelevision Commission annual reports over the 6 years to 1998, shows a shallow but steady upwardtrend over the 6-year period in the conversion of latent predispositions into actual complaints tothe Advertising Standards Authority and Independent Television Commission, about a relativelyconstant number of broadcast and non-broadcast advertisements.

Not all those complaints were in response to deliberately provocative creative tactics, which arethe focus of this study. Analysis of Advertising Standards Authority and Independent TelevisionCommission annual reports has shown that 35% of the 94 478 complaints over the same period ofyears were related to controversial images and messages (Advertising Standards Authority, 1999a;Independent Television Commission, 1999). The Advertising Standards Authority’s (1999b)

FIGURE 1. Trends in complaining. Sources: Advertising Standards Authority andIndependent Television Commission annual reports.

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criterion of decency is that ‘advertisements should contain nothing that is likely to cause seriousor widespread offence’ (Clause 5.1) and they added that they might be ‘distasteful’ even ifthose requirements were met; ‘responsibility to consumers and to society’ (Clause 5.2) was notexplicitly de� ned. The Independent Television Commission’s (1997) test for offensiveness is that‘no advertisement may offend against good taste or decency or be offensive to public feeling and noadvertisement should prejudice respect for human dignity’ (Clause 13).

THE LITERATURE

Reviewing the substantial literature relating to ‘complaining behaviour’ revealed that it does notdeal with the pro� le of the complainants, but rather with the nature of the complaints (mainlydirected at retailers by customers) and the recipients’ subsequent actions. Moreover, a recentauthoritative review showed that interest in the topic suddenly waned 10 years ago (Stephens andGwinner, 1998, p. 172).

There is also a body of literature concerning the general issue of controversial advertising.For example, Boddewyn (1991) proposed that such ‘hard’ causes of controversy as the ‘deceptivecharacter of advertisements’ and ‘proper substantiation of advertising claims’ should be dis-tinguished from such ‘soft’ issues as ‘decency, taste, public opinion and social responsibility’.Our study is concerned with the latter, which he noted are ‘more dif� cult to de� ne and handlebecause they re� ect a large variety of personally subjective, culturally related and historicallychanging values’ (p. 25). A � eld study of shoppers in the USA by Barnes and Dotson (1990,p. 61) separated objections provoked by ‘offensive execution’ from those related to ‘offensiveproducts’, noting that advertising planners have more control over the former dimension.The Benetton, French Connection and Calvin Klein cases reported earlier are all examples ofadvertising for intrinsically inoffensive products executed in a way that many people foundoffensive.

It appears that, so far, only one study has examined the pro� le of those who are offended. Alwittand Prabhaker (1994) investigated the demography of members of a nationally representativehousehold panel in the USA who professed to dislike television advertising, who in our termsare latent activists. Their conclusion was that ‘demographic characteristics alone cannot be usedto identify dislikers’ (Alwitt and Prabhaker, 1994, p. 22–23). However, the sophistication of thedemographic measures they used was far removed from the diagnostic potential of the researchinstrument used in our own study (see the Methodology section).

RATIONALE FOR THE STUDY

The practical likelihood of collateral damage depends crucially upon the predisposition toactivism among accidentally addressed individuals beyond the target audience. As long as the mediaschedule includes such classic mass media as large poster sites, high-circulation magazines and (incases other than those so far mentioned) television, that meta-audience is bound to be effectively across-section of the population at large. Though a few researchers still think of that as an inert anddefenceless ‘admass’, modern theorists favour various models of ordinary people voluntarilyengaging with advertising messages and images or choosing not to (e.g. Lannon and Cooper, 1983;Jones, 1990). Thus, the originators of controversial advertising are addressing what an industryresearch report has called ‘the ad-� uent society’ (Leo Burnett Ltd, 1990). It is only one step from� uency to dialogue, both positive and negative.

The focus of the study reported here is on one particular form of activism: complaining to the

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Advertising Standards Authority and Independent Television Commission about advertisementsthat are found to be offensive. The role of these two bodies in the system for regulating Britishadvertising is explained in Baker (1998, pp. 10, 15 and 128).

It is surprising that ours should be the � rst study of this aspect of audience behaviour in the UK,where a notable specialization in advertising agencies is the account planning discipline. This seeksto ‘make advertising better and more effective by introducing consumers and their attitudes intothe advertising development process . . . providing an holistic understanding of consumers andbrands, and the ways that they connect’ (Cooper, 1997, p. xv). Yet the practitioners’ handbook inwhich this statement is made contains no reference at all to public opinion, complaining behaviouror any of the regulatory bodies that receive complaints. Nor does a literature review titledThe Longer and Broader Effects of Advertising’ published by the Institute of Practitioners inAdvertising (Baker, 1990).

RESEARCH OBJECTIVE

The general aim of the study reported here is to provide advertising agency planners and theirclients with research-based planning information to supplant (or at least supplement) intuition andspeculation about the accidental dissemination of potentially objectionable images and messagesto a non-targeted meta-audience. In practice, it could thereby reduce the risk of collateral damagein future campaigns by minimizing such accidental communication ‘leakage’. The speci� cobjective was to construct geographic and psychographic pro� les of complainants who wrote tothe Advertising Standards Authority and Independent Television Commission over the period1996–1998 with details of where they lived and what type of people they were.

METHODOLOGY

The � rst step towards achievement of the research objective was made possible by access topostcodes accompanying formal complaints made to the Advertising Standards Authority andIndependent Television Commission; this is the � rst time that they had been made available beyondthese respective organizations. These alphanumeric codes contain up to four elements (the ‘out-ward code’) separated by a space from three more elements (the ‘inward code’). They locate everyUK household and all commercial premises within one of approximately 1.8 million ‘postcodeunits’, each consisting on average of 15 letterboxes. A more detailed explanation of the systemcan be found in Baker (1998, p. 203). Though postcodes thus identify clusters of addresses ratherthan individuals, the Advertising Standards Authority chose to ensure total anonymity for itscomplainants by releasing only the � rst half, to the left of the space, whereas the IndependentTelevision Commission provided them in full. The total data set of complete and incomplete codesthus available related to 53 198 complainants.

In order to analyse their geographic distribution, a purpose-built conversion table was developed.Of� cial tables and maps obtained from the of� ce of Population Surveys, London PlanningAdvisory Committee and Royal Mail were cross-indexed by inspection. Crosier et al. (1999) gavea more complete explanation of this conversion process and presented the unique conversion tableit produced. All outward codes were then allocated to one of the standard regions or to GreaterLondon (except a few in Guernsey, Jersey or the Isle of Man, the populations of which could notbe extracted from the available government statistics). That distribution was compared with anallocation of the total based on the resident population in each location: in short, actual was

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compared with expected. A standard computer package was used for generating a map showing theoutcome.

In order to build a psychographic pro� le, MOSAIC analysis software was used (with permission)for allocating all complete postcodes to one of 52 social ‘types’. The underpinning logic ofthis commercial classi� cation system and its competitors is that people de� ne themselves by therelatively homogeneous ‘neighbourhoods’ in which they choose to live (Sleight, 1995). These arein turn described qualitatively by summarizing their make-up with respect to 87 variables.Our study was the � rst time this technology has been applied to consumer activism in any context.The outcome was a pro� le of the providers of the postcodes, which might variously be called‘geodemographic’, ‘sociographic’, ‘psychographic’ or ‘lifestyle’. For the purposes of this study,we considered these terms to be effectively synonymous.

RESEARCH FINDINGS

Where are the activists?

The histograms superimposed on the map in Fig. 2 compare the expected incidence of com-plaining in key areas of the UK (pale bars) with the actual incidence found in the study (dark bars).They were derived from the raw data set out in Table 2. The geographical boundaries delineatethe 11 standard statistical regions of the UK plus, detached, Greater London. The result is ageographical index of latent activism.

There was a clear geographical bias in the propensity to complain to the Advertising StandardsAuthority and Independent Television Commission. The variation in height between the dark andpale bars unequivocally demonstrates that it re� ects the notorious north–south socioeconomicdivide in the UK. Actual complaining exceeded the expected volume in the south-east of thecountry, while the reverse held true in the north. The four locations in which the propensity tocomplain was highest were all south of a line from The Wash to the Bristol Channel and four of the� ve in which it was lowest were more or less north of a line from the Humber to the Mersey. Thelatter included six of the eight of� cially designated ‘conurbations’, the most densely populatedmetropolitan areas in the country.

Who are the activists?

For the methodological reasons already explained, the psychographic pro� le of activists presentedhere is only based on the 13 362 individuals who complained to the Independent TelevisionCommission between 1996 and 1998.

Table 3 shows that the lifestyle pro� le of the complainants was distinctive to a signi� cant degree.A cluster with an index above 120 consisted of career managers or professionals and those whowere well-educated, well-off, older, exhibited some bohemian tendencies, identi� ed with thechattering classes and who were likely to live in the suburbs or the country.

A similar-sized cluster with an index of less than 50 painted an uncompromising pictureof under-privilege. This pro� le is entirely consistent with the evidence in Table 2 that thegeographical areas with a low index of activism contain most of the nation’s big industrialconurbations.

Since advertising, media planners routinely use MOSAIC for target audience identi� cation,this pro� le will permit advertisers pursuing provocative creative tactics with the opportunity ofminimizing accidental exposure to potential activists.

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DISCUSSION

Our � ndings showed that approximately 250 000 households contained someone who had alreadymade a formal complaint about an advertisement. That � gure was ten times the number ofcomplaints received over the period of the study by the Advertising Standards Authority andIndependent Television Commission. Some of the discrepancy will be accounted for by memoryof long-past actions and some by direct complaints to the media concerned or to otherquasi-regulatory bodies, but we are left with a wide range of possibilities. Whatever the true volumeof complaining, the data showed a slow but steady upward trend. The Advertising StandardsAuthority and Independent Television Commission data showed that over one-third of complaintswere objections to being offended rather than being misled.

The admittedly relatively small number of people who do complain constitutes an activistcore in the meta-audience, which is a source of potential opinion leadership. We also identi� ed asigni� cant reservoir of latent activism. Though the salience of advertising is low and attitudes arenot generally unfavourable, the one direct measure of predisposition available suggested that asmany as 16 million UK households will one day make a formal complaint about an advertisement

FIGURE 2. Geographic index of activism. Source: Table 2.

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and already know how to do so. As existing activism is thereby augmented, limited opinionleadership will be transformed into increasing social pressure on the remainder of the meta-audience. The key issue is when the number of activists will reach a critical mass, as it were. This

TABLE 2. Geographical distribution of complainants 1996–1998

Location All complaints % All households %

South East 11 299 24.7 4 482 806 19.1London 9814 21.4 2 973 751 12.7South West 4363 9.5 2 021 869 8.6North West 4218 9.2 2 612 194 11.1West Midlands 3482 7.6 2 125 933 9.1Yorkshire and Humberside 2680 5.9 2 077 920 8.8East Midlands 2614 5.7 1 689 763 7.2Scotland 2472 5.4 2 147 902 9.1East Anglia 1928 4.2 890 266 3.8Wales 1517 3.3 1 173 467 5.0North 1424 3.1 1 289 579 5.5Total 45 811 100.0 23 485 450 100.0

The base was 53 148 postcodes provided by complainants in the 3-year period 1996–1998 minus those in NorthernIreland.Sources: the Advertising Standards Authority, Independent Television Commission and Estimates Unit of the Of� ce forNational Statistics. All locations except Greater London and South East are standard statistical regions. London is agovernment of� cial region, the population of which has been subtracted from the standard statistical population of theSouth East for the purposes of this table.

TABLE 3. Psychographic pro� le of activists

High (more than 120) Average (70–120) Low (less than 70)

Mosaic type Index Mosaic type Index Mosaic type Index

Chattering classes 189 Non-private housing 120 Rootless renters 69Clever capitalists 183 Af� uent blue collar 111 Depopulated terraces 69Gentri� ed villages 168 Rural retirement mix 111 Coop club and colliery 68Bohemian melting pot 168 Town centre singles 109 Inner city towers 67Corporate careerists 166 Military bases 109 Brand new areas 67Ageing professionals 162 Green belt expansion 107 Victorian tenements 64Bedsits and shop � ats 145 Bijou homemakers 104 Low rise pensioners 60Studio singles 140 Market town mixture 100 Elderly in own � ats 57Lowland agribusiness 136 Pre-nuptial owners 100 Low rise subsistence 56Pebble dash subtopia 133 Tied/Tenant farmers 99 Problem families 56Maturing mortgagers 132 Rejuvenated terraces 95 Smokestack shiftwork 56Suburban mock Tudor 131 Low-rise right to buy 88 Sweatshop sharers 48Rising materialists 129 Nest making families 84 Mid rise overspill 42Upland and small farms 128 1930s industrial spec 79 Solo pensioners 41Small time business 126 Aged owner occupiers 77 Families in the sky 41College and communal 123 High spending greys 71 Small town industry 37Rural disadvantage 123 Better off council 70 Flats for the aged 28

Graf� tied ghettos 28

See the text for the source.

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scenario is supported by anecdotal evidence that a ‘culture of complaining’ is developing in Britishsociety.

This study devised a geographic index of activism and a psychographic pro� le of activists.Together, they paint a clear picture of a social group not far removed from a mixture of universitylecturers and the legendary ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’, living within 100 miles or so ofLondon. Such people are indeed potentially effective opinion leaders.

The provocative campaigns reported earlier all used the poster medium as the vehicle fordelivering an allegedly targeted message to an allegedly tolerant audience. Since that medium ishighly unselective in the audience it reaches, users have no right to be surprised when leakage tothe meta-audience results in offence. If the intention is simply to gain leverage from ‘free’ publicity,it is to be hoped that a planner can present a persuasive rationale for risking long-term collateraldamage. If not, more careful media planning is strongly indicated.

However, the very decision to pursue a provocative creative strategy deserves second thoughts.On the one hand, this ‘soft’ element of campaign planning is particularly susceptible to subjectiveencoding by creative teams and, on the other, equally subjective deconstruction by audiences(see Boddewyn, 1991). In that case, one particular role of advertising agency planners becomesparticularly important, namely the one often de� ned as ‘being the eyes and ears of the targetaudience’. If no planners are involved in the process, someone must take this perspective. TheBenetton and French Connection examples show the potential for collateral damage whencreatives enjoy free rein.

CONCLUSIONS

To summarize, leakage of images and messages to a meta-audience can result in negative socialpressure from in� uential activists and consequent long-term collateral damage to an advertisingcampaign. If a potentially controversial creative strategy has been adopted, it is therefore importantto develop a media strategy that minimizes accidental leakage. The � ndings of this study providecampaign planners with a unique template for doing so.

Our overall conclusions are that advertisers should act in the following ways:

(1) Close the communications loop by proactively monitoring reactions in the meta-audience,which is a signi� cant step beyond conventional ‘effectiveness measurement’.

(2) Encourage creative teams to recognize the danger of confronting the meta-audience withmaterial in dubious taste.

(3) Make sure that media planners pursue strategies for minimizing leakage beyond the targetmarket.

(4) Reassure themselves that a planner, somewhere, is weighing any short-term bene� t inbreaking these rules against the long-term risk of collateral damage.

Finally, we should acknowledge four methodological provisos to these conclusions. First, theAdvertising Standards Authority and Independent Television Commission both received com-plainants from individuals who either gave no postcode or provided an invalid one. Nevertheless,the usable samples were 73.2 and 93.3% of their respective totals and the total data set analysedcomprised more than 53 000 postcodes. Second, because the Advertising Standards Authoritysubset consisted of incomplete postcodes, the psychographic pro� le had to be built from theIndependent Television Commission data alone. However, the same four geographical areasexhibited the highest index of activism in both subsets, while the four with the lowest containedthree in common. There is no logical reason to suspect that they would not be equally well

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matched on a psychographical basis. Third, neither subset was structured in a way that permittedseparation of the 35% whose objection was to ‘soft’ executional aspects of the offending advertise-ments from those who complained about advertisements being misleading, dishonest or untruthful(see Barnes and Dotson, 1990; Boddewyn, 1991). However, there is no logical reason for expectingthe two pro� les to be signi� cantly different. Fourth, formal complaining was adopted as an interimsurrogate for all other indicators of activism until representative samples of the other categories inTable 1 can be similarly pro� led. However, it seems likely that the lead provided by overt activistswill be the catalyst in any future transformation of latent activism.

On balance, we have con� dence in the reliability of our � ndings and the applicability of ourconclusions.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We gratefully acknowledge the cooperation of the late Frank Willis, director of advertising andsponsorship at the Independent Television Commission and Caroline Crawford, former director ofcommunications at the Advertising Standards Authority, the permission of Experian Ltd to usetheir systems and data for geodemographic analysis, and the data processing expertise of Dr TonyHernandez of the Centre for the Study of Commercial Activity at Ryerson Polytechnic University,Toronto, formerly of Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Taste and Decency in Non-broadcast Advertising. London: Advertising Standards Authority.Advertising Standards Authority (1999a) Annual Report 1998. London: Advertising Standards Authority.Advertising Standards Authority (1999b) The British Codes of Advertising and Sales Promotion. London:

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BIOGRAPHIES

Keith Crosier is honorary senior research fellow and former director of teaching in the Depart-ment of Marketing at the University of Strathclyde, UK. A scientist by training, with an MSc inmanagement studies from Durham University Business School, he was an advertising manager inLondon and New York for 6 years. His current research interests are the sociology of marketingcommunications and the strategic planning process in the advertising business.

B. Zafer Erdogan is an assistant professor in the Department of Marketing, DumlupinarUniversity, Turkey. He holds an MBA degree from the University of Hartford, USA and a PhDfrom the University of Strathclyde, UK. His current teaching and research interests are develop-ments in marketing communications, branding, social marketing and research methods.

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