Academic literature on the topic 'Mortgage Advertisements'

PurposeMortgage lenders often combine a variety of framing strategies when developing mortgage advertisements. To date, these frames have mostly been studied separately. This paper, however, studies the combined framing effects of message valence, specificity, and temporality on consumers' mortgage decision-making.Design/methodology/approachA mixed methods design was used. First, 13 unique print ads collected from a Canadian newspaper were analyzed for content. Second, a 2 × 2 × 2 scenario-based experiment with 400 undergraduate participants examined the framing effects of valence, specificity and temporality on attitudes toward the mortgage advertising message, the product advertised, and the brand, as well as on consumers' behavioral intentions toward the advertised mortgage product.FindingsThe content analysis suggests that combined framing does exist in print ads. A positive message with a fixed term and a specific interest rate were the most commonly used frames. The experiment revealed that, for behavioral intentions, the main effect of the message temporality was significant. The effects of advertising a long-term mortgage on behavioral intentions were more favorable than those of advertising a short-term mortgage.Practical implicationsThis research provides a combined framing model for designing advertising strategies for the financial services industry to market complex financial products, such as mortgage loans to consumers. This is relevant to lenders when designing a persuasive package or ads for potential customers.Originality/valueThis study is the first of its kind to investigate the effects of combinations of message frames on consumers' mortgage decision-making, while also advancing the understanding of message framing theory for the financial services industry.

The article presents the results of an empirical study of the features of evaluating advertising of banking products. 99 respondents with a different experience of borrowing behaviour, aged 18 to 66, 37 per cent males, were assessed. The respondents were asked to rate, using the semantic differential methodology, two pictures depicting mortgage advertisements from VTB and Otkritie banks. By comparing the average values of the ratings, we found that advertising for banking products is evaluated more negatively, even if the ideal option is presented. Actual advertising images are rated significantly lower than ideal images — people with real experience of taking loans rate advertising for banking products as more benevolent.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of this legislative reform in the state of South Australia (SA) through an examination of the relationship between listed or advertised price and transaction prices before and after the changes in regulation. Between 2000 and 2008, legislative changes took place throughout Australia to make real-estate transactions more transparent and to deal with misleading conduct by real-estate agents. The practice of “charm” or “bait” pricing was targeted. This denotes the under-quoting of estimated selling prices in real-estate sale advertisements which can be considered deceptive or even fraudulent. Design/methodology/approach – The study area is Adelaide, the state capital of SA and includes analysis of first and last advertised prices and eventual selling price for > 120,000 residential sales transactions over a nine-year period between 2003 and 2011. The analysis to test these hypotheses included, first, a descriptive evaluation of the percentage price difference over time and a spatial breakdown of mean percentage price difference before and after legislation. Second, for each hypothesis, the change was tested by measuring the variance of the percentage change, with significance established through the Levene and Brown–Forsythe tests, rather than by the mean percentage change. Findings – The results, both descriptive and statistical, support the effectiveness of the reform in legislation. Research limitations/implications – The study has application in terms of agents as social gatekeepers and confirms the role of regulation to ensure market values are achieved and consumers not disadvantaged. With friction in the market, imperfect information and the possible behavioural responses of land agents, there may be incomplete market correction of underpricing strategies. This paper confirms the effectiveness of one such market intervention. Social implications – Some half a million dwellings are purchased in Australia every year. Annually, in the state of SA, some 53,000 dwellings are financed to be purchased or built. These levels of purchase reflect national home ownership rates of about 69 per cent, with some 33 per cent of Australians owning their houses outright and a growing number, some 36 per cent, owners with a mortgage. Australian households also move house relatively frequently. In 2008, 43 per cent of Australians reported moving in the previous 5 years, 15 per cent had moved 3 or more times. The most common reasons for moving were twofold, either to buy a house or to buy a bigger house. These levels of purchase, home ownership and mobility underpin the importance and viability of some 10,000 real-estate services businesses in Australia; a sector which, up to 2,000, was largely self-regulated. Originality/value – This paper is one of the first in Australia to effectively quantify the success of legislative reform on residential agency behaviour.

Purpose – Identifying the protected characteristics under the Equality Act of the UK, the purpose of this paper is to discover the extent to which the protected characteristics are featured in British newspaper advertisements, as evidence of diversity and equality in the country. Design/methodology/approach – Content analysis of advertisements obtained from nine national newspapers of the UK collected over 12 months. The criteria used to select the newspapers were category, popularity (circulation figures) and the readership demographics (range and variety of the audience). Findings – Disabled individuals are under-represented in print advertisements, and so are close relationships between individuals of the same sex signifying a civil partnership (or sexual orientation). There seems to be an equal level of portrayal of males and females, though men still feature more in a business setting while women are seen more in home settings. Practical implications – The findings suggest opportunities for advertisers to integrate disabled individuals into their marketing campaigns, not just as a business strategy for targeted markets but as individuals in a diversified community. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people could also be featured in advertisements for products and services that couples usually buy together, for example, holidays and mortgages. Originality/value – This study expands on the existing study on the portrayal in advertisements of stereotypes of genders, different age-groups and ethnic minorities. The portrayal of disability, sexuality and religious beliefs were considered within newspapers in UK, bridging some crucial gaps and providing outcomes relevant to numerous types of stakeholders, including the brands, advertising industry and academic researchers.

AbstractUp to now Herman Becker, one of the people who lent Rembrandt money in the straitened circumstances of the last years of his life, has had a bad press as an art-dealer who owed his wealth and influence to the exploitation of artists (Notes 1, 2). It is now possible to correct this image on the basis of recent research in the Amsterdam archives. Becker was born around 1617 and the supposition that he came from Riga in Latvia is borne out by the facts that he had contacts there, that his father Willem certainly lived there between 1640 and 1650 and that the words 'of or 'to' Riga appear in some documents after his name. His commercial activities certainly go back to 1635 (note 6) and from the earliest records of him in Amsterdam in the 1640s, it is clear that he was a merchant and that he also chartered ships. At this period he further invested money in shares and engaged in a certain amount of moneylending, while he is also mentioned as his father's agent. That financially he was almost certainly in a sound osition by the end of the 1640s is clear from the fact that in 1648 he gave a surety for the merchant Gerard Pelgrom, who was in debt to the Dutch East India Company. That same year he concluded an agreement with the merchant Abraham de Visscher to sell sailcloth for him in Riga. In the 1650s Becker strengthened his financial position and again engaged in moneylending. In 1653 he made a large loan to Johannes de Renialme, an art lover and dealer, and at the time of the latter's death in 1657 his debt to Becker was even larger, while the inventory of his estate mentions nine paintings, including three by Jan Lievens and one by Philips de Koninck, which were mortgaged to Becker along with some jewelry. From the autumn of 1653 Becker spent a considerable time in Riga, but he was certainly back in Amsterdam in 1658. In 1659 he married Anna Maria Vertangen, the widow of his former business contact Gerard Pelgrom, who had died in 1657. This marriage brought Becker two large houses on Keizersgracht, where he moved in June 1659. That he was a Lutheran emerges from records of the baptisms of two of his three children at the Lutheran church in Amsterdam. His wife died shortly after the birth of theyoungest child and was buried in the Oude Kerk on 9 November 1661. By her will Becker was granted usufruct of all her property until his death, on condition that he did not remarry. This increase in his means led to a change of direction in his activities in the 1660s and a growth in the scale and scope of his moneylending. Becker's library (see Appendix I) The list of books in Becker's inventory amounts to 285 titles, a not inconsiderable library by 17th-century standards (Note 26). Their diversity indicates that, though clearly an educated man, he was not a scholar, while they were not arranged under subjects, like a scholar's library, but according to sizes. The presence of works in Latin indicates that Becker must have been educated at a Latin or grammar school, but the large number of German titles point to his coming from the influential German elite, which had long dominated the city government, trade and the guilds in Riga and part of which, like Becker, was Evangelical Lutheran by religion. Books on religion and theology formed a third of the 145 books of which the titles are given, followed by histories and chronicles, classical literature, law, poetry, medicine, physics and astronomy. Contacts with artists In the 1660s Becker continued his shipping interest, but now also invested in property, building a house next to the two others on Keizersgracht in 1665. He also continued to lend money, now for the first time to artists. Rembrandt is known to have owed three sums of money to Becker: 537 guilders borrowed in December 1662 at 5% interest, 450 guilders borrowed in March 1663 against a pledge, and an obligation to Lodewijck van Ludick which was sold to Becker early in 1664 (Notes 31,32). Difficulties over repayment probably arose in the first two instances over disagreement as to the conditions of the loans. On 29 August 1665 the apothecary Abraham Francken declared in a sworn statement that he had ofered the amount due, plus the interest, to Becker at Rembrandt's request, but that Becker had refused to accept it, because Rembrandt first had to finish a Juno and also had to do something else for him. Rembrandt appears to have threatened legal action, but in any case the matter was settled on 6 October 1665 when Becker accepted the payment and returned the pledge, in the form of nine paintings and two (constprint boecken'. What happened to the Juno is not clear. A Juno by Rembrandt is listed in Becker's inventory and it is generally assumed that the Juno in the Armand Hammer Foundation in Los Angeles is the one mentiorted in the statemertt and the inventory. That it is certainly the one in the statement would seem to be justified by the fact that it appears to be unfinished (Notes 37,38). The sale of the obligation to Lodewijck van Ludick to Becker is attested in statements of 31 December 1664 by Abraham Francken and the poet-cum-dyer Thomas Asselyn, the latter declaring that it was bought for textiles to the value of 500 guilders. Three years later Rembrandt had still not paid the debt and the case was brought before an arbitration commission. In the commission's findings of 24 July 1668 the extent of the debt was settled at 1082 guilders, two-thirds of which had to be paid in cash, while the rest was to be paid off in six months in the form of drawings, prints or paintings. Rembrandt also agreed to pay the cash amount within six months while Becker agreed to pay Rembrandt's share of the costs. Rembrandt offered his person and possessions as surety and his son Titus also came forward as guarantor. Whether the debt was ever paid is unclear: Titus died shortly afterwards and Rembrandt about a year later (Note 42). The conditions were actually quite lenient, while Becker's admiration for Rembrandt's art is clear from the fact that he did not mind whether the debt was paid in paintings, prints or drawings. The fourteen works by Rembrandt in Becker's inventory are the largest group by a single master. Obviously Becker had a predilectionfor his work and bought it, but he did not sell it on, as has been suggested (Note 44). Two other artists who borrowed money from Becker were Frederick de Moucheron, who was given an apparently interest-free loan of a hundred guilders in August 1662 and Jan Lievens the Elder, who borrowed four hundred guilders in all between May 1667 and October 1668. By far the greatest number of loans made by Becker date from the period 1674-8, his debtors including Willem Six, Gerrit Uylenburg, Willem Blauw and Abraham van Halmael, as well as the artists Philips de Koninck, Domenicus van Tol and Antony van der Laen. The pledges for the loans are extremely varied, but paintinas often figured among them in the case of both artists and non-artists. In addition Becker also continued to invest in shipping and property. At the end of the summer of 1678 he fell seriously ill and on 16 September he was buried in the Oude Kerk. His estate at his death amounted to 200,000 guilders and it seems fairly clear that in the 1660s and 1670s his activities as a merchant had declined and he had lived mainly off the interest on loarts. Becker's collection of paintings (see Appendix II) Becker appears to have begun collecting pictures around 1660, when the increase in his means allowed it. By comparison with other collections of the day, such as those of Jan van de Cappelle (197 paintings) and Gerrit Uylenburg (95 paintings), his 231 works represent a very sizable holding (Note 63). In the case of 137 of them the name of the painter is known, the best represented artists being Rembrandt (14 works), Jan Lievens the Elder (6), Jan Lievens the Younger (10), Philips de Koninck (7), Frederick de Moucheron (5) and Rubens (3). The collection also included worksfrom Rembrandt's circle (Last-man and Bol) and from Haarlem (Brouwer, Jan de Bray, Goltzius and Cornelis van Haarlem), and in addition work by much earlier artists such as Dürer, Holbein, Lucas van Leyden and Herri met de Bles, as well as ten pictures of Italian origin. Becker certainly acquired paintings through his moneylending and he may further have had agreements like the one with Rembrandt with other artists, these actually being advantageous to both parties. However, his loans to artists were not very numerous, so he must certainly have bought a great many pictures as well. An advertisement discovered in the Oprechte Haerlems Dinsdacgse Courant of 21 March 1679 shows that Becker's art collection was sold separately from the rest of his estate. It also clearly describes him as a collector of many year's standing.No indication whatever has been found that Becker acted as an art-dealer, while his known financial transactions with artists show him to have acted fairly and in no sense can he be said to have exploited them.

"If people don't trust their information, it's not much better than a Marxist-Leninist society." -- Orville Schell Dean, Graduate School of Journalism, UC Berkeley "Most people aren't very discerning. Maybe they need good financial information, but I don't think people know what good information is when you get into culture, society, and politics." -- Steven Brill,Chairman and Editor-in-chief, Brill's Content Once upon a time, not very long ago, advertisements were easy to recognise. They had simple personalities with goals not much more complicated than selling you a bar of soap or a box of cereal. And they possessed the reassuring familiarity of old friends or relatives you've known all your life. They were Pilgrims who smiled at you from Quaker Oats boxes or little tablets named "Speedy" who joyfully danced into a glass of water with the sole purpose of giving up their short life to help lessen your indigestion from overindulgence. Yes, sometimes they could be a little obnoxious but, hey, it was a predictable annoyance. And once, not very long ago, advertisements also knew their place in the landscape of popular culture, their boundaries were the ad space of magazines or the commercial time of television programs. When the ads got too annoying, you could toss the magazine aside or change the TV channel. The ease and quickness of their dispatch had the abruptness of slamming your front door in the face of an old door-to-door salesman. This all began to change around the 1950s when advertisements acquired a more complex and subtle personality and began straying outside of their familiar media neighborhoods. The social observer Vance Packard wrote a best-selling book in the late 50s called The Hidden Persuaders which identified this change in advertising's personality as coming from hanging around Professor Freud's psychoanalysis and learning his hidden, subliminal methods of trickery. Ice cubes in a glass for a liquor ad were no longer seen as simple props to help sell a brand of whiskey but were now subliminal suggestions of female anatomy. The curved fronts of automobiles were more than aesthetic streamlined design features but rather suggestive of a particular feature of the male anatomy. Forgotten by the new subliminal types of ads was the simple salesmanship preached by founders of the ad industry like David Ogilvy and John Caples. The word "sales" became a dirty word and was replaced with modern psychological buzzwords like subliminal persuasion. The Evolution of Subliminal Techniques The book Hidden Persuaders made quite a stir at the time, bringing about congressional hearings and even the introduction of legislation. Prominent motivation researchers Louis Cheskin and Ernest Dichter utilised the new ad methods and were publicly admonished as traitors to their profession. The life of the new subliminal advertising seemed short indeed. Even Vance Packard predicted its coming demise. "Eventually, say by A.D. 2000," he wrote in the preface to the paperback edition of his book, "all this depth manipulation of the psychological variety will seem amusingly old- fashioned". Yet, 40 years later, any half-awake observer of popular culture knows that things haven't exactly worked out the way Packard predicted. In fact what seems old-fashioned today is the belief that ads are those simpletons they once were before the 50s and that products are sold for features and benefits rather than for images. Even Vance Packard expresses an amazement at the evolution of advertising since the 50s, noting that today ads for watches have nothing to do with watches or that ads for shoes scarcely mention shoes. Packard remarks "it used to be the brand identified the product. In today's advertising the brand is the product". Modern advertising, he notes, has an almost total obsession with images and feelings and an almost total lack of any concrete claims about the product and why anyone should buy it. Packard admits puzzlement. "Commercials seem totally unrelated to selling any product at all". Jeff DeJoseph of the J. Walter Thompson firm underlines Packard's comments. "We are just trying to convey a sensory impression of the brand, and we're out of there". Subliminal advertising techniques have today infiltrated the heart of corporate America. As Ruth Shalit notes in her article "The Return of the Hidden Persuaders" from the 27 September 1999 issue of Salon magazine, "far from being consigned to the maverick fringe, the new psycho- persuaders of corporate America have colonized the marketing departments of mainstream conglomerates. At companies like Kraft, Coca-Cola, Proctor & Gamble and Daimler-Chrysler, the most sought-after consultants hail not from McKinsey & Company, but from brand consultancies with names like Archetype Discoveries, PsychoLogics and Semiotic Solutions". Shalit notes a growing number of CEOs have become convinced they cannot sell their brands until they first explore the "Jungian substrata of four- wheel drive; unlock the discourse codes of female power sweating; or deconstruct the sexual politics of bologna". The result, as Shalit observes, is a "charmingly retro school of brand psychoanalysis, which holds that all advertising is simply a variation on the themes of the Oedipus complex, the death instinct, or toilet training, and that the goal of effective communications should be to compensate the consumer for the fact that he was insufficiently nursed as an infant, has taken corporate America by storm". The Growing Ubiquity of Advertising Yet pervasive as the subliminal techniques of advertising have become, the emerging power of modern advertising ultimately centres around "where" it is rather than "what" it is or "how" it works. The power of modern advertising is within this growing ubiquity or "everywhereness" of advertising rather than the technology and methodology of advertising. The ultimate power of advertising will be arrived at when ads cannot be distinguished from their background environment. When this happens, the environment will become a great continuous ad. In the process, ads have wandered away from their well-known hangouts in magazines and TV shows. Like alien-infected pod-people of early science fiction movies, they have stumbled out of these familiar media playgrounds and suddenly sprouted up everywhere. The ubiquity of advertising is not being driven by corporations searching for new ways to sell products but by media searching for new ways to make money. Traditionally, media made money by selling subscriptions and advertising space. But these two key income sources are quickly drying up in the new world of online media. Journalist Mike France wisely takes notice of this change in an important article "Journalism's Online Credibility Gap" from the 11 October 1999 issue of Business Week. France notes that subscription fees have not worked because "Web surfers are used to getting content for free, and they have been reluctant to shell out any money for it". Advertising sales and their Internet incarnation in banner ads have also been a failure so far, France observes, because companies don't like paying a flat fee for online advertising since it's difficult to track the effectiveness of their marketing dollars. Instead, they only want to pay for actual sales leads, which can be easily monitored on the Web as readers' click from site to site. Faced with the above situation, media companies have gone on the prowl for new ways to make money. This search underpins the emerging ubiquity of advertising: the fact that it is increasingly appearing everywhere. In the process, traditional boundaries between advertising and other societal institutions are being overrun by these media forces on the prowl for new "territory" to exploit. That time when advertisements knew their place in the landscape of popular culture and confined themselves to just magazines or TV commercials is a fading memory. And today, as each of us is bombarded by thousands of ads each day, it is impossible to "slam" the door and keep them out of our house as we could once slam the door in the face of the old door-to-door salesmen. Of course you can find them on the matchbook cover of your favorite bar, on t-shirts sold at some roadside tourist trap or on those logo baseball caps you always pick up at trade shows. But now they have got a little more personal and stare at you over urinals in the men's room. They have even wedged themselves onto the narrow little bars at the check-out counter conveyer belts of supermarkets or onto the handles of gasoline pumps at filling stations. The list goes on and on. (No, this article is not an ad.) Advertising and Entertainment In advertising's march to ubiquity, two major boundaries have been crossed. They are crucial boundaries which greatly enhance advertising's search for the invisibility of ubiquity. Yet they are also largely invisible themselves. These are the boundaries separating advertising from entertainment and those separating advertising from journalism. The incursion of advertising into entertainment is a result of the increasing merger of business and entertainment, a phenomenon pointed out in best-selling business books like Michael Wolf's Entertainment Economy and Joseph Pine's The Experience Economy. Wolf, a consultant for Viacom, Newscorp, and other media heavy-weights, argues business is becoming synonymous with entertainment: "we have come to expect that we will be entertained all the time. Products and brands that deliver on this expectation are succeeding. Products that do not will disappear". And, in The Experience Economy, Pine notes the increasing need for businesses to provide entertaining experiences. "Those businesses that relegate themselves to the diminishing world of goods and services will be rendered irrelevant. To avoid this fate, you must learn to stage a rich, compelling experience". Yet entertainment, whether provided by businesses or the traditional entertainment industry, is increasingly weighted down with the "baggage" of advertising. In a large sense, entertainment is a form of new media that carries ads. Increasingly, this seems to be the overriding purpose of entertainment. Once, not long ago, when ads were simple and confined, entertainment was also simple and its purpose was to entertain rather than to sell. There was money enough in packed movie houses or full theme parks to make a healthy profit. But all this has changed with advertising's ubiquity. Like media corporations searching for new revenue streams, the entertainment industry has responded to flat growth by finding new ways to squeeze money out of entertainment content. Films now feature products in paid for scenes and most forms of entertainment use product tie-ins to other areas such as retail stores or fast-food restaurants. Also popular with the entertainment industry is what might be termed the "versioning" of entertainment products into various sub-species where entertainment content is transformed into other media so it can be sold more than once. A film may not make a profit on just the theatrical release but there is a good chance it doesn't matter because it stands to make a profit in video rentals. Advertising and Journalism The merger of advertising and entertainment goes a long way towards a world of ubiquitous advertising. Yet the merger of advertising and journalism is the real "promised land" in the evolution of ubiquitous advertising. This fundamental shift in the way news media make money provides the final frontier to be conquered by advertising, a final "promised land" for advertising. As Mike France observes in Business Week, this merger "could potentially change the way they cover the news. The more the press gets in the business of hawking products, the harder it will be to criticize those goods -- and the companies making them". Of course, there is that persistent myth, perpetuated by news organisations that they attempt to preserve editorial independence by keeping the institutions they cover and their advertisers at arm's length. But this is proving more and more difficult, particularly for online media. Observers like France have pointed out a number of reasons for this. One is the growth of ads in news media that look more like editorial content than ads. While long-standing ethical rules bar magazines and newspapers from printing advertisements that look like editorial copy, these rules become fuzzy for many online publications. Another reason making it difficult to separate advertising from journalism is the growing merger and consolidation of media corporations. Fewer and fewer corporations control more and more entertainment, news and ultimately advertising. It becomes difficult for a journalist to criticise a product when it has a connection to the large media conglomerate the journalist works for. Traditionally, it has been rare for media corporations to make direct investments in the corporations they cover. However, as Mike France notes, CNBC crossed this line when it acquired a stake in Archipelago in September 1999. CNBC, which runs a business-news Website, acquired a 12.4% stake in Archipelago Holdings, an electronic communications network for trading stock. Long-term plans are likely to include allowing visitors to cnbc.com to link directly to Archipelago. That means CNBC could be in the awkward position of both providing coverage of online trading and profiting from it. France adds that other business news outlets, such as Dow Jones (DJ), Reuters, and Bloomberg, already have indirect ties to their own electronic stock-trading networks. And, in news organisations, a popular method of cutting down on the expense of paying journalists for content is the growing practice of accepting advertiser written content or "sponsored edit" stories. The confusion to readers violates the spirit of a long-standing American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) rule prohibiting advertisements with "an editorial appearance". But as France notes, this practice is thriving online. This change happens in ever so subtle ways. "A bit of puffery inserted here," notes France, "a negative adjective deleted there -- it doesn't take a lot to turn a review or story about, say, smart phones, into something approaching highbrow ad copy". He offers an example in forbes.com whose Microsoft ads could easily be mistaken for staff-written articles. Media critic James Fallows points out that consumers have been swift to discipline sites that are caught acting unethically and using "sponsored edits". He notes that when it was revealed that amazon.com was taking fees of up to $10,000 for books that it labelled as "destined for greatness", its customers were outraged, and the company quickly agreed to disclose future promotional payments. Unfortunately, though, the lesson episodes like these teach online companies like Amazon centres around more effective ways to be less "revealing" rather than abstention from the practice of "sponsored edits". France reminds us that journalism is built on trust. In the age of the Internet, though, trust is quickly becoming an elusive quality. He writes "as magazines, newspapers, radio stations, and television networks rush to colonize the Internet, the Great Wall between content and commerce is beginning to erode". In the end, he ponders whether there is an irrevocable conflict between e-commerce and ethical journalism. When you can't trust journalists to be ethical, just who can you trust? Transaction Fees & Affiliate Programs - Advertising's Final Promised Land? The engine driving the growing ubiquity of advertising, though, is not the increasing merger of advertising with other industries (like entertainment and journalism) but rather a new business model of online commerce and Internet technology called transaction fees. This emerging and potentially dominant Internet e-commerce technology provides for the ability to track transactions electronically on Websites and to garner transaction fees. Through these fees, many media Websites take a percentage of payment through online product sales. In effect, a media site becomes one pervasive direct mail ad for every product mentioned on its site. This of course puts them in a much closer economic partnership with advertisers than is the case with traditional fixed-rate ads where there is little connection between product sales and the advertising media carrying them. Transaction fees are the new online version of direct marketing, the emerging Internet technology for their application is one of the great economic driving forces of the entire Internet commerce apparatus. The promise of transaction fees is that a number of people, besides product manufacturers and advertisers, might gain a percentage of profit from selling products via hypertext links. Once upon a time, the manufacturer of a product was the one that gained (or lost) from marketing it. Now, however, there is the possibility that journalists, news organisations and entertainment companies might also gain from marketing via transaction fees. The spread of transaction fees outside media into the general population provides an even greater boost to the growing ubiquity of advertising. This is done through the handmaiden of media transaction fees: "affiliate programs" for the general populace. Through the growing magic of Internet technology, it becomes possible for all of us to earn money through affiliate program links to products and transaction fee percentages in the sale of these products. Given this scenario, it is not surprising that advertisers are most likely to increasingly pressure media Websites to support themselves with e-commerce transaction fees. Charles Li, Senior Analyst for New Media at Forrester Research, estimates that by the year 2003, media sites will receive $25 billion in revenue from transaction fees, compared with $17 billion from ads and $5 billion from subscriptions. The possibility is great that all media will become like great direct response advertisements taking a transaction fee percentage for anything sold on their sites. And there is the more dangerous possibility that all of us will become the new "promised land" for a ubiquitous advertising. All of us will have some cut in selling somebody else's product. When this happens and there is a direct economic incentive for all of us to say nice things about products, what is the need and importance of subliminal techniques and methods creating advertising based on images which try to trick us into buying things? A Society Without Critics? It is for these reasons that criticism and straight news are becoming an increasingly endangered species. Everyone has to eat but what happens when one can no longer make meal money by criticising current culture? Cultural critics become a dying breed. There is no money in criticism because it is based around disconnection rather than connection to products. No links to products or Websites are involved here. Critics are becoming lonely icebergs floating in the middle of a cyber-sea of transaction fees, watching everyone else (except themselves) make money on transaction fees. The subliminal focus of the current consultancies is little more than a repackaging of an old theme discovered long ago by Vance Packard. But the growing "everywhereness" and "everyoneness" of modern advertising through transaction fees may mark the beginning of a revolutionary new era. Everyone might become their own "brand", a point well made in Tim Peters's article "A Brand Called You". Media critic James Fallows is somewhat optimistic that there still may remain "niche" markets for truthful information and honest cultural criticism. He suggests that surely people looking for mortgages, voting for a politician, or trying to decide what movie to see will continue to need unbiased information to help them make decisions. But one must ask what happens when a number of people have some "affiliate" relationship with suggesting particular movies, politicians or mortgages? Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, has summarised this growing ubiquity of advertising in a rather simple and elegant manner saying "at a certain point, people won't be able to differentiate between what's trustworthy and what isn't". Over the long run, this loss of credibility could have a corrosive effect on society in general -- especially given the media's importance as a political, cultural, and economic watchdog. Schell warns, "if people don't trust their information, it's not much better than a Marxist-Leninist society". Yet, will we be able to realise this simple fact when we all become types of Marxists and Leninists? Still, there is the great challenge to America to learn how to utilise transaction fees in a democratic manner. In effect, a combination of the technological promise of the new economy with that old promise, and perhaps even myth, of a democratic America. America stands on the verge of a great threshold and challenge in the growing ubiquity of advertising. In a way, as with most great opportunities or threats, this challenge centres on a peculiar paradox. On the one hand, there is the promise of the emerging Internet business model and its centre around the technology of transaction fees. At the same time, there is the threat posed by transaction fees to America's democratic society in the early years of the new millennium. Yes, once upon a time, not very long ago, advertisements were easy to recognise and also knew their place in the landscape of popular culture. Their greatest, yet silent, evolution (especially in the age of the Internet) has really been in their spread into all areas of culture rather than in methods of trickery and deceit. Now, it is more difficult to slam that front door in the face of that old door-to-door salesman. Or toss that magazine and its ad aside, or switch off commercials on television. We have become that door-to-door salesman, that magazine ad, that television commercial. The current cultural landscape takes on some of the characteristics of the theme of that old science fiction movie The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. A current advertising campaign from RJ Reynolds has a humorous take on the current zeitgeist fad of alien abduction with copy reading "if aliens are smart enough to travel through space then why do they keep abducting the dumbest people on earth?" One might add that when Americans allow advertising to travel through all our space, perhaps we all become the dumbest people on earth, abducted by a new alien culture so far away from a simplistic nostalgia of yesterday. (Please press below for your links to a world of fantastic products which can make a new you.) References Brill, Steven. Quoted by Mike France in "Journalism's Online Credibility Gap." Business Week 11 Oct. 1999. France, Mike. "Journalism's Online Credibility Gap." Business Week 11 Oct. 1999. <http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_41/b3650163.htm>. Packard, Vance. The Hidden Persuaders. Out of Print, 1957. Pine, Joseph, and James Gilmore. The Experience Economy. Harvard Business School P, 1999. Shalit, Ruth. "The Return of the Hidden Persuaders." Salon Magazine 27 Sep. 1999. <http://www.salon.com/media/col/shal/1999/09/27/persuaders/index.php>. Schell, Orville. Quoted by Mike France in "Journalism's Online Credibility Gap." Business Week 11 Oct. 1999. Wolf, Michael. Entertainment Economy. Times Books, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA style: John Fraim. "Friendly Persuasion: The Growing Ubiquity of Advertising, or What Happens When Everyone Becomes an Ad?." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.1 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/ads.php>. Chicago style: John Fraim, "Friendly Persuasion: The Growing Ubiquity of Advertising, or What Happens When Everyone Becomes an Ad?," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 1 (2000), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/ads.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: John Fraim. (2000) Friendly Persuasion: The Growing Ubiquity of Advertising, or What Happens When Everyone Becomes an Ad?. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/ads.php> ([your date of access]).

Le droit des sûretés réelles a fait l’objet de profondes mutations à la suite de plusieurs réformes successives qui viennent de l’affecter. Si la matière s’est indubitablement modernisée, il reste qu’elle souffre d’un manque de cohérence globale qui tient tout à la fois à la trop grande offre de sûretés et à l’insuffisance de règles fédératrices venant régir l’ensemble. La question se pose alors de savoir s’il est possible et envisageable de dégager un socle de règles communes plus élaboré, voire même un droit commun, et selon quelles modalités. Il en ressort l’interrogation sur l’efficacité du droit ohada des sûretés réelles au regard de l’inadéquation entre les objectifs du législateur africain et les moyens qu’il a mis en oeuvre pour les atteindre. Au regard des expériences internationales, la réponse à ces questionnements réside à notre sens dans une réforme plus ambitieuse du droit ohada des sûretés réelles qui se traduirait par l’adoption d’une approche fonctionnelle telle qu’il nous a été donné de voir dans des pays appartenant à la même tradition juridique que la nôtre. Plus concrètement, il s’agira de redonner, à travers cette conception fonctionnelle des sûretés, de la cohérence, de la simplicité et de l’accessibilité, en somme de l’efficacité au droit ohada des sûretés réelles de manière à le rapprocher des populations et des réalités socio-économiques des États de l’ohada tout en n’occultant pas les enjeux économiques internationaux
The real security interests law/secured transactions has gone through crucial changes following a series of several reforms which has affected it. If the subject matter has undoubtedly been modernized, it is obvious that the real security interests law/secured transactions is still lacking of general consistency which is linked simultaneously to the large numbers of proposal on security interests and to the insufficiency of federative rules which come to govern the whole. Actually, the problem poses the question to know if it is possible and conceivable to put forward a base of more sophisticated general rules, or even a general law, and according to what methods? The interrogation underlines the efficacy of ohada real securities law in regard to the inadequacy between the objectives of the African legislator and the means used by him to achieve them. In other words, it is admitted to question on the way of a reinforcement of the actual real securities law in sight of a greatest efficacy. In regard to the international experiences, the answer of these questioning is found, in our opinion, in a reform more ambitious of the ohada real securities law which is going to lead to the adoption of a functional approach as it was observed in States with the same juridical culture of ours. In concrete terms, it is important to give back, through this functional conception of securities interest, coherence, and simplicity, in sum, efficacy to ohada real securities law likewise to bring it closer to the population and to the socio-economic realities of ohada member States while revealing the international economic stakes