Saturday, August 31, 2019

Global Food Crisis Essay

Food shortage is fast taking global catastrophic proportions. The UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon warns the world that it could trigger off crisis upon crisis if the problem is not acted upon and solved before it is too late. The food crisis did not just happen overnight. Global Warming has had a hand in it. Heavy rains and flooding in the rice fields of Asia greatly affected rice production, enough to cause a shortage. With the decrease in supply and an increase in demand for it, prices rose. Prices of other commodities as well as oil, fertilizer and energy required for food production were similarly affected. Gradual switch of energy sources from fossil fuels to bio fuels even with its concern for the environment is an adverse threat to food production. Faced with a food crisis should be a wake up call for everyone. For the fortunate few with food on their table, they must think of the hungry in the other parts of the world. They must not panic-buy knowing that others may go without a morsel of their horde. Artificial shortages give the sellers reason to jack up prices. The destructive effects of global warming may have been caused by our neglect and is now beyond our control. But an economic crisis that may be one of the domino effects of the food crisis may be avoided by our own doing. Hunger has always been in our midst, maybe not anywhere near the more affluent First World but in the African continent. Africa has wide, but dry barren lands that have not been used much for agriculture. Why suffer the pangs of hunger when the solution is right before us waiting to be tapped? We could develop the soil for agriculture. Science and Technology is a continuous discipline that stops at nothing in search of cures, solutions, means and methods to problems that face us everyday. Fund sourcing must be a global effort. We must all do our share to help feed the world and solve the current crisis. There is nothing we can not do for the world if we have the concern, the will and the action plan. Works Cited Engeler, Eliane. UN to set up Task Force to tackle Global Food Crisis. Bern, Switzerland; The Associated Press, 2008.

Friday, August 30, 2019

The Patriot Movie

The Patriot Movie The Patriot movie has been a great movie. All the scenes were incredible and others were devastating. Having to watch this history movie has become one of my favorite movies with the scenes that I have chosen. My first scene I chose was actually a very sad part of the movie. It was when Benjamins 2nd oldest son was shot by one of the British cruel leaders. He was killed because he was trying to free his oldest son Gabriel and was shot instead. After that, Benjamin became upset because the British leader ended up ordering to kill the wounded American’s and burned his house down.He got his sons, the guns and went after them to get his oldest son. They ended up killing all the soldiers and made sure they all died and ended up freeing his son from getting executed. The reaction I got from this part of the movie was very shocking that they would kill a kid and burn down a whole house. It’s also shocking that they were allowed to do all that. What I liked ab out it though was that he went after his son and did not care about what he had to do, he just had to decide it and go after it. The second scene I chose was when Gabriel went to the church and tried to ask for people to join.At the church the pastor asked for him to leave and was trying to make him leave but he wouldn’t. Anne, his future wife ends up helping him and convinces everyone to let him talk and started talking about how everyone is always talking about helping, independence and freedom. That they should act upon what they believe and help. After all that I like that he asked her father if he can write to her while he is at war. My reaction to this was very interesting how she defended him and actually helped him get the people’s attention.How she spoke up to everyone and just what was her opinion and what she thought was right. I just felt it was right and that she used her freedom of speech and spoke up The third scene I have chosen was when Benjamin tricke d the soldiers and took his back by talking to the British commander. Tavington got very angry and found out about 7 soldiers homes and went after Benjamins family. His family ended up noticing and hid, some of the American soldiers showed up and took his family while others fought the rest of the British soldiers.By this time I was really interested in this part and was glad that they ended up hiding. I was shocked most of the movie but this part was another main one. It was shocking when I was expecting them to catch one of his younger sons under the table. The fourth scene would be when Gabriel’s wife goes home after their marriage and shows up to the British soldiers gathering her whole village in a temple. The soldiers locked them in and burned it. Later on Gabriel went and found everything and could not find his wife so he went after Tavington and ended up getting killed by him.I felt so sad when this happened. I was very confident at first, happy that Tavington was get ting killed until he turned around and stabbed Gabriel. A Very disappointing feeling and shocked once more. The last and fifth scene was when they were all fighting against each other. And most of his close soldiers were dieing and when he found Tavington they got into a big fight. Tavington almost killed Benjamin, but Benjamin ended up switching it around. I knew it was going to end in a positive way but at that moment I was just curious of what else could of happened.I didn’t think that Benjamin was going to get out of that death and it shocked me the most. Very shocking movie. My reaction to this whole movie was a lot of twisted feelings. It was a very sad, shocking movie and I couldn’t really predict on what would happen next. It has to be one of my favorite war movies and I’m glad I watched it. I would definitely recommend it to someone who was in a history class to watch it. I’m glad it ended in a good note and was just surprised in all the twisted things it had and was just disappointed on who did not make it to the end. A good movie, with a good end.

Thursday, August 29, 2019

Argument Paper Fast Food

Zinczenko is saying that common sense would say it is personal responsibility to be an active eater and know what you are putting in your mouth. In discussions of fast-food obesity, one controversial issue has been the lack of the nutritional facts. On the one hand people should do research before they eat instead of blaming fast-food places. On the other hand the nutritional facts should be placed on the food itself. In my opinion, personal responsibility should be taken for what you eat because fast-food places are not forcing you to eat their food. For instance common sense says something that is dunked in grease and cooked in five minutes cannot be good for you. Becoming obese from fast-food is the result of no self-control. Grease in itself contains many calories and causes many problems with blood pressure, cholesterol and type two diabetes. Zinczenko states, â€Å"Today According to the National Institutes of Health, type 2 diabetes accounts for at least 30 percent of all new childhood cases of diabetes on this country† (Zinczenko 154). Type 2 diabetes is obesity related and a serious disease. Poulin 2 Common sense tells you eating two meals a day, in a fast-food restaurant, will cause you to gain weight. This unhealthy weight gain tells people that there is a problem to the way they are eating and it is not the washer shrinking their jeans. Instead of walking into McDonalds kids can walk into Subway and try a sandwich that is healthier and cost about the same as the huge meals they can get at McDonalds. There are healthier alternatives that re just as fast and taste as good as burger joints. Although I grant that many people might say there is no way of knowing how many calories are in fast-food meal has because of the lack of nutritional labels, labels are readily available on fast-food websites. The labels would not change the fact that it is personal responsibility to know that something that has been smothered in grease has no nutritional value. On the one hand, I agree with people that labels should be put on fast-food explaining what is in the food. But on the other hand, I still insist that people should do the research if labels are the main concern of nutritional values. Just because people have labels explaining the fat content does not mean they will stop eating the food. This is where personal responsibility needs to come into play. When people find out what really is in the food and the content of fat people need to be active and make the right decision to not add fast-food into their daily diets. Self-control is a huge factor here and people need to take charge, putting themselves in charge of a healthy lifestyle. In the end it is only the consumer who can control what they consume not the companies and blame cannot be put on that one party. Proponents of fast-food restaurants causing obesity are right to argue that the food causes you to gain weight when you eat it regularly, it is cheap, it is easily accessible, and it is catered to children. But they exaggerate when they claim that fast-food is the number one reason for child obesity in the United States. Poulin 3 You can argue that children who sit in front of video games and computers all day long are a huge contributing factor to the obesity rate. Their lack of activity can cause pounds to pile on and that has nothing to do with McDonalds Fast-food. For instance fast-food has always made me feel sick to my stomach. My common sense would tell me that as good as it does taste my body does not like fast-food. When I was younger I gained a lot of weight because I would eat at McDonalds every chance I got. I was unaware that I could be making better choices and choose not to eat it. Kids today are uneducated on how to make healthier choices and live healthier lives with the influences of fast-food. Zinczenko states, â€Å"But most of the teenagers who live, as I once did, on a fast-food diet won’t turn their lives around: They’ve crossed under the golden arches to a likely fate of lifetime obesity† (Zinczenko 154). If the country believes that fast-food is the cause of childhood obesity then why do we still continue to eat it? People need to realize labels are not put on the food because if people really knew what was in the food they would not continue to eat it. Again that is where common sense should tell you that you should not eat fast-food. Although at a first glance People, including young and old, might say that fast-food is the cause of being obese. But on a closer inspection it is really the individuals fault. For example people are so quick to blame fast-food restaurants for making them obese that they jump right to suing the corporation, but are they actually doing something about the obesity. Zinczenko mentions in his article how one meal can contain â€Å"up around 1,040 calories which is half of the government’s recommended daily calorie intake. And that doesn’t take into account the 450-calorie super-size Coke† (Zinczenko 155). The calorie intake should tell anyone that eating this way and especially eating this way twice a day is extremely unhealthy and fattening. People need Poulin 4 to speak up and demand labels. Zinczenko says, â€Å"They would do well to protect themselves, and their customers, by providing the nutrition information people need to make informed choices about their products. Without such warnings, we’ll see more sick, obese children and angrier, litigious parents† (Zinczenko 155). Parents need to be more active in their children’s lives and teach them about healthy life styles that way in the future generations can be much healthier. In conclusion people need to take personal responsibility for their own weight and stop forcing the blame on fast-food corporations. Common sense should tell you that greasy food is not good for you and that it has no nutritional value. Many people can say that labels are the cause of obesity because they are uniformed about what they are eating. Labels are readily available at any fast-food chain and on their websites. People need to speak up and come up with a solution to this issue rather than be part of the problem. Common sense also says that if it is cooked in grease it is a good chance it is covered in fat. People are responsible for their own lives and they need to stop blaming others for their short comings. Ultimately what is at stake here is a healthier generation.

Wednesday, August 28, 2019

Case study Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words - 2

Case Study Example Each medical practitioner and service provider has a different recordkeeping system in place, each of these systems has a cost of its own, having a free system in place would cut down costs remarkably. According estimates the cost reduction would be to the tune of S80 to $240 billion dollars (Laudon & Laudon, 2009). The recordkeeping systems are not interconnected with one another. An individual may have one record with their dentist, another with their general family practitioner and yet another with their gynecologist. In case one medical service provider needs to see the records from another medical service provider, the patient has to lug around the physical files. In case the patient goes to a practitioner in an emergency, they may not be able to give them a full picture of the various illnesses, sensitivities or allergies they may have, leading to a wrong diagnosis. With a central system of records in place all medical practitioners that a person visits would have access to all their medical records and would be able to get a complete picture of the persons state of health. Electronic recordkeeping will reduce the costs related to recordkeeping for each medical service provider. There may be some cost for transferring existing records to the online system. The management would have to make sure that misuse and leakage of information does not occur. The implementation of this technology would make it easier to organize and access medical records. There should be laws in place restricting the use of medical information in profiling especially through methods such as non-obvious relationship awareness which have the potential of causing trouble for law abiding citizens. HIPAA guarantees should be extended to online records. Once such guarantees are in place, medical service providers and patients will be more likely to adopt electronic medical recordkeeping. There should be a single format for all medical recordkeeping. Rival systems should be able to

Tuesday, August 27, 2019

Tree-Species Density across Environmental Gradients Zones Research Paper

Tree-Species Density across Environmental Gradients Zones - Research Paper Example Vegetative populations proliferate in a given section of land when conditions of moisture, temperature, and soil composition favor certain species at the expense of others. Experiments of this sort are crucial to enhancing our understanding of species diversity. Â  Similar ecological conditions can exist between both mountainous regions and ravine systems. Either of these landscape systems can yield effects on communities of vegetation, providing niches where they may not otherwise exist. Landscape effects can be hydrological, thermal, and these locations are known to produce microclimates with influences on soil moisture and nutrient availability. Â  The hydrological cycle in the region can experience variations in water infiltration within the soil, proclivities towards erosion/soil retention, movements of air fronts and dry adiabatic lapse rates; all relating to the slope of the terrain, or lack thereof. Terrain slopes affect soil types, which impact the growth of a variety of plants, which itself influences sunlight availability, which influences the success of subsequent vegetation. These combinations cause vegetation to arrange in communities favoring undergrowth/ground cover, shrubs, and canopy trees. Trees are of specific importance for this study, which will document tendencies of five species to colonize either of three environmental gradient-levels upon sloping terrain. Â  These gradient-levels form zones that will naturally distribute similar plants along a horizontal axis to take advantage of the slope conditions most favorable to them, while the most variation will occur along a vertical axis, as soil and air conditions vary with elevation. Â  

Monday, August 26, 2019

Product Design and Development Management [Brand creation and Essay

Product Design and Development Management [Brand creation and development] - Essay Example Karl Speak even argues that marketplace position and intimate relationships are today valued above profitability. The present â€Å"information age† has turned consumer culture development and brand relationships as the new â€Å"best practice† in business (49). What makes branding an important marketing tool, is that â€Å"the brand image is enduring in the minds of the customer† (Montague 17). Branding is a powerful instrument to counteract market negative pressures, because branding makes companies, products and services visible and distinct; it prolongs products life cycles, and allows companies to sustain costs and prices to levels that are less dependent on competition. Developing a strong brand identity that is consistent with corporate strategy is therefore the recipe for long-term success. Brand identity refers to the degree a product has achieved a distinct image in the eyes of consumers and the general public (Schmitt et al 83). â€Å"It’s corporate strategy made visible.† (Peters 11). Brand identity is closely related to customer impressions, meaning the image a product or a company actually has, as opposed to product or corporate expressions, meaning the image that is desired (Schmitt et al 84). Often companies produce positioning statements that describe how the brands should be positioned in the minds of customers. These statements are the backbone for branding strategies that attempt to minimize the gap between desired brand image and actual identity. Brands make promises for unique product experience. Delivery of those promises is therefore crucial for creating lasting impressions and loyal customers. The brand management profession commands a range of tools for successful brand development. These are graphic standards, conformity to corporate identity, marketing communications sending consistent brand

Sunday, August 25, 2019

Information systems 2 Coursework Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Information systems 2 - Coursework Example Red Cross gets information about individuals during membership registration, blood donation exercises or during participation in charity activities. Individual details are regularly updated in these institutions as in Tesco updates are made when one shops online. Individual’s tastes and preferences are updated depending on his or her shopping basket. Too details are updated when one uses his or her Tesco credit card or club card when shopping. There are loads of concerns about personal data privacy. Privacy about personal information is of much concern like on financial status for example Tesco supermarkets can access accounts of its credit card holders. Health data should be held secret. Therefore people are afraid of hackers, email scams or phishing and cookies which may expose them to dangers. Data can be retrieved from different sources. The sources can be either internal or external. For Tesco, internal sources of data include sales from internal operations such as sales data, in cventory data, human resource data, systems data, product data and marketing data. These may include information from data from internal research, campaigns and promotions. External sources in Tesco include information from competitors’ sales and products, from website, and other third party data such as census data, survey data and demographics data. There are a number of assumptions that are made during warehouse building. For web sources it was assumed that conjunctive queries were enough to retrieve information of interest. Too the information collected was assumed to cover the whole population. The integrity of data was highly reliable. A decision support system is a computer based system or subsystem that is interactive and intended to assist in decision making. It employs the use of communication technologies, documents, data, and knowledge models to solve problems and make decisions

News Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words - 1

News - Essay Example Allegedly several secrets were established and the worst trouble ensued when the public came to know the fact that she possible had known about the attack of US embassy in Libya without sharing the delicate information with the relevant authorities, this amounted to the Benghazi case on an attack on the U.S. embassy (Collinson, 2015). Fox Network news also aired another controversial story on Clinton. The broadcast network placed the story as a second airing. It entailed the claims that a gentleman named George Stephanopoulos had donated to the benevolent Clinton foundation. The donations, however, were undisclosed to the public. That instigated controversial questions surrounding the probable intents of the whole act. The airing was brief as compared to the CNN’s case (it took six minutes). From this observation, it is notable that both the broadcasts had stories in their headlines about Hillary Clinton, which were interestingly controversial and detrimental to her reputation. George Stephanopoulos had served in the Bill Clinton presidential campaign in 1992 and even held some top positions in the administration including being the spokesperson and senior advisor of Bill Clinton. This story was viewed as more credible as compared to the previous case where the public had claimed that the emails had nothin g incriminating against the former first lady. In a second CNN coverage, it aired a planned nationwide memorial day despite the death of 17 bikers who died in the supposedly biker shoot out in Waco, Texas between rival groups (Karimi, 2015). The news lasted for about 8 minutes. The news portrayed the bikers as a violent and unlawful lot that threatened public peace. On the dreadful day set to honor the fallen soldiers of the Second World War, the bikers threatened to honor the17 lost lives of their fellows (Karimi, 2015). The bikers had promised to hold motorcycles’ rallies in a manner to honor their fallen mates.

Saturday, August 24, 2019

Principles of the Constitution Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words

Principles of the Constitution - Essay Example The executive is the presidency and the ministers in office. The legislature is the senators and congressional representatives of the house. The judiciary interprets the constitution and operates the judiciary system. These three arms of government interact closely in order to serve the American citizens. The executive comes up with policies, which it sends to the legislature for approval and the judiciary determines the constitutionalism of approved laws and policies or statutes (Cuninghame, 1811). The three arms of government operate in a constructive manner to promote the will of the people by passing policies and statutes that consider the welfare of the electorate. As such, the representatives of the people pay more concern about serving the people’s agenda rather than fulfilling their personal interests. The electorate plays an important role in the attitudes and actions of the elected officials as they judge the official on their performance and delivery on their promises, failure to which they vote him or her out of

Friday, August 23, 2019

Summary and Critical Response Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Summary and Critical Response - Assignment Example Some skills are learnt in these workplaces, Etzioni claims, but they are often not a good example. Money earned in these jobs is spent by teens to support themselves, in poorer areas, or saved for a major item, but more often it is used to buy trend items, with little lasting value, according to Etzioni. He concludes the article by advising balance in activities for teenagers, so that the desire to earn money does not prevent a well-rounded educational process. (199 words) Critical Response to the article â€Å"Working at McDonald’s† by Amitai Etzioni Amitai Etzioni in the article â€Å"†Working at McDonald’s† examines the phenomenon of teen employment in the United States. The writer’s central claim is that the kind of employment that is offered to teens, and their widespread joining of such employment, is becoming a problem due to the inappropriate nature of the jobs they are able to get. At the outset, the writer acknowledges that very few scientific studies have been carried out to examine the nature of jobs at places such as fast-food outlets. This concession may strengthen the argument presented, because it suggests that the writer is going to persuade the reader with logical argument based on personal observations. A point of view is going to be proposed, for the audience to be convinced by. On the other hand, it may weaken the argument, in that not enough scientifically proven fact exists to strengthen what is being claimed. The latter is true. This article presents an almost entirely personal point-of-view, and generalizations so wide that the reader would have to question even the most simple of Etzioni’s claims. An important example of generalization is that there are more traditional teen jobs, which are much better for young people than current ones. The claim is that the traditional lemonade stands, which teach the value of entrepreneurship, and paper routes, to learn the skills of hard work and regu lar, good service fit into the American work ethic better than jobs currently(according to the writer). Not only is it a generalization to propose that every youngster in the past benefited from these â€Å"wholesome† jobs, it is also an appeal to the emotions of Americans, generally, in that the writer presumes that everyone believes that the old way of life in the USA was better than the current one. Other generalizations follow: that all teenagers with very few exceptions spend their money unwisely; that most fast-food outlets are poorly managed and do not allow for the employee to take initiative; that all teenagers’ school education is badly affected by part-time work. Added to these sweeping statements, the writer also appeals to the reader’s emotions, and exaggerates the actual conditions of work for teens. He uses negative terms such as â€Å"pot party† to describe these workplaces. Any parent would not be happy with the possibility that a childâ €™s place of work could be described in this way. Etzioni further proposes that the kind of work available to teenagers causes the continued poverty of sections of the American population: â€Å"

Thursday, August 22, 2019

Medeas situation Essay Example for Free

Medeas situation Essay Dogan people in the city who didnt believe Cassandra because she was an outsider. In this play it  was learned that sometimes the most insightful people are the outsiders because they are not blinded by the normal activities of the main characters.  Another minor character that foretells the future is Medeas nurse in The Medea. The Nurse has a different situation than Cassandra. She is more familiar with Meadea and her children and knows of their daily activities. She begins to have insight on Medeas situation when Medea starts to see a change in her relationships between Jason and her children. She first foretells the murder of Medeas children, who were indeed murdered but by Medea herself. In the very beginning of the story, the Nurse talks about Medeas dwindling love for Jason. But now theres hatred everywhere, Love is diseased.  (Greene, Lattimore, Euripides I, 59)  With her love for Jason waning, she begins to think less and less of her children because they remind her of him.  She has turned from the children and does not see them./I am afraid she may think of some dreadful thing,/For her heart is violent. (Greene, Lattimore, Euripides I, 60)  With her heart violent, she doesnt think anymore of the children except to carry out her evil plan which is to kill Creusa. Another quote that shows the deterioration of Jasons and Medeas relationship is the conversation that the Nurse and the Tutor were having. And will Jason put up with it that his children/Should suffer so, though hes no friend to their mother? (Greene, Lattimore,  Dogan 4  Euripides I, 61)  The Nurse is showing her concern here when she asks about what would Jason do about his children since hes not in love with Medea anymore. Towards the end, it is subtly made known that Jason only wanted the children as heirs to the throne that he did not take because Medea killed Creusa. The Nurse may not have foreshadowed as much as Cassandra did, but she gave the reader an idea of what was going to happen to the children.  In conclusion, minor characters do have some meaning plot-wise. They are not blinded by the everyday life of the main characters allowing them to see the obvious without the help from others. Without them, the story would be mainly about two or more parties and their actions minus the suspense that the minor character gives the reader. (947) Works Cited Greene, David and Lattimore, Richard, eds. Aeschylus I. The University of Chicago. 1953.

Wednesday, August 21, 2019

How the US and Soviet Union Became Adversaries

How the US and Soviet Union Became Adversaries HOW THE UNITED STATES AND SOVIET UNION BECOME COLD WAR ADVERSARIES No one seems to be able to agree on an exact date of when the Cold War began. There was never an official announcement of warfare to note the start beginning of the conflict. Many say it began around the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917. Others say it began after World War II, when both powers tried to settle their differences and decide what to do with Europe. They entered World War II for different reasons: the Soviets because of Germany’s invasion and the United States because Hitler declared war after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Both were well ahead of other countries in many areas. However, after the World War their similarities ended. The differences between the nations outweighed the similarities enormously. Both countries had their own ideas as to how things should have been during the period after the war. This can be seen in the Potsdam, Tehran, and Yalta conferences. Also, they both tried to enforce their ideologies through events during the Iron Curta in and Marshall Plan. To begin with, many believe that conflicts between the Soviet Union can be traced back to the Russian Revolution of 1917, started by Vladimir Lenin. The ensuing civil war, in which Western powers unsuccessfully intervened, and the creation of Comintern, an organization dedicated to the spreading of communism, globally fuelled a climate of mistrust and fear between Russia and the rest of Europe/America. From 1918 to 1935, with the US pursuing a policy of isolationism and Stalin keeping Russia looking inward, the situation remained one of dislike rather than conflict. rom 1918 to 1935, with the US pursuing a policy of isolationism and Stalin keeping Russia looking inward, the situation remained one of dislike rather than conflict. In 1935 Stalin changed his policy: afraid of fascism, he tried to form an alliance with the democratic Western powers against Nazi Germany. This initiative failed and in 1939 Stalin signed the Nazi-Soviet pact with Hitler, which only increased anti-Soviet hos tility in the West, but delayed the onset of war between the two powers. However, while Stalin hoped Germany would get bogged down in a war with France, early Nazi conquests occurred quickly, enabling Germany to invade the Soviet Union in 1941. The Second World War and the Political Division of Europe The German invasion of Russia, which followed a successful invasion of France, united the Soviets with Western Europe and later America in an alliance against their common enemy: Adolf Hitler. This war transformed the global balance of power, weakening Europe and leaving Russia and the United States of America as global super-powers, with massive military strength; everyone else was second. However, the wartime alliance was not an easy one, and by 1943 each side was thinking about the state of Post-war Europe. Russia ‘liberated’ vast areas of Eastern Europe, into which it wanted to put its own brand of government and turn into soviet satellite states, in part to gain security from the capitalist West. Although the Allies tried to gain assurances for democratic elections from Russia during mid and post war conferences, there was ultimately nothing they could do to stop Russia from imposing its will on their conquests. In 1944 Churchill, Prime Minister of Britain, was quoted as saying â€Å"Make no mistake, all the Balkans apart from Greece are going to be Bolshevised and there’s nothing I can do to prevent it. There’s nothing I can do for Poland, either†. Meanwhile the Allies liberated large parts of Western Europe in which they recreated democratic nations. Two Superpower Blocs and Mutual Distrust World War Two finished in 1945 with Europe divided into two blocs, each occupied by the armies of, in the west America and the Allies, and in the east, Russia. America wanted a democratic Europe and was afraid of communism dominating the continent while Russia wanted the opposite, a communist Europe in which they dominated and not, as they feared, a united, capitalist Europe. Stalin believed, at first, that capitalist nations would soon fall to squabbling among themselves, a situation he could exploit, and was dismayed by the growing organisation among the West. To these differences were added fear of Soviet invasion in the West and Russian fear of the atomic bomb; fear of economic collapse in the west versus fear of economic domination by the west; a clash of ideologies (capitalism versus communism) and, on the Soviet front, the fear of a rearmed Germany hostile to Russia. In 1946 Churchill described the dividing line between East and West as an Iron Curtain. Containment, the Marshall Plan and the Economic Division of Europe America reacted to the threat of the spread of both Soviet power and communist thinking by commencing the policy of ‘containment’, outlined in a speech to Congress on March 12 1947, action aimed at stopping any further Soviet expansion and isolating the ‘empire’ which existed. The need to halt Soviet expansion seemed all the more important later that year as Hungary was taken over by a one party communist system, and later when a new communist government took over the Czech state in a coup, nations which until then Stalin had been content to leave as a middle ground between the communist and capitalist blocs. Meanwhile Western Europe was having severe economic difficulties as the nations struggled to recover from the devastating effects of the recent war. Worried that communist sympathisers were gaining influence as the economy worsened, to secure the western markets for US products and to put containment into practice, America reacted with the ‘Marsha ll Plan’ of massive economic aid. Although it was offered to both eastern and western nations, albeit with certain strings attached, Stalin made sure it was rejected in the Soviet sphere of influence, a response the US had been expecting. Between 1947 and 1952 $13 billion was given to 16 mainly western nations and, while the effects are still debated, it generally boosted the economies of member nations and helped freeze communist groups from power, for example in France, where the communists members of the coalition government were ousted. It also created an economic divide as clear as the political one between the two power blocs. Meanwhile Stalin formed COMECON, the ‘Commission for Mutual Economic Aid’, in 1949 to promote trade and economic growth among its satellites and Cominform, a union of communist parties (including those in the west) to spread communism. Containment also led to other initiatives: in 1947 the CIA spent large amounts to influence the result of Italy’s elections, helping the Christian Democrats defeat the Communist party. By 1948, with Europe was firmly divided into communist and capitalist, Russian supported and American supported, Germany became the new ‘battleground ’. Germany was divided into four parts and occupied by Britain, France, America and Russia; Berlin, situated in the Soviet zone, was also divided. In 1948 Stalin enforced a blockade of Western Berlin aimed at bluffing the Allies into renegotiating the division of Germany in his favour, rather than them declaring war over the cut off zones. However, Stalin had miscalculated the ability of airpower, and the Allies responded with the ‘Berlin Airlift’: for eleven months supplies were flown into Berlin. This was in turn a bluff, for the Allied planes had to fly over Russian airspace and the Allies gambled that Stalin wouldn’t shoot them down and risk war. He didn’t and the blockade was ended in May 1949 when Stalin gave up. The Berlin Blockade was the first time the previous diplomatic and political divisions in Europe had become an open battle of wills, the former allies now certain enemies. More on the Berlin Blockade NATO, the Warsaw Pact and the renewed Military Division of Europe In April 1949, with the Berlin Blockade in full effect and the threat of conflict with Russia looming, the Western powers signed the NATO treaty in Washington, creating a military alliance: the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. The emphasis was firmly on defence from Soviet activity. That same year Russia detonated its first atomic weapon, negating the America advantage and reducing the chance of the powers engaging in a ‘regular’ war because of fears over the consequences of nuclear conflict. There were debates over the next few years among NATO powers over whether to rearm West Germany and in 1955 it became a full member of NATO. A week later eastern nations signed the Warsaw Pact, creating a military alliance under a Soviet commander. A Cold War By 1949 two sides had formed, power blocs which were deeply opposed to each other, each believing the other threatened them and everything they stood for (and in many ways they did). Although there was no traditional warfare, there was a nuclear standoff and attitudes and ideology hardened over the next decades, the gap between them growing more entrenched. This led to the ‘Red Scare’ in the United States and yet more crushing of dissent in Russia. However, by this time the Cold War had also spread beyond the boundaries of Europe, becoming truly global as China became communist and America intervened in Korea and Vietnam. Nuclear weapons also grew more power with the creation, in 1952 by the US and in 1953 by the USSR, of thermonuclear weapons which were vastly more destructive than those dropped during the Second World War. This led to the development of ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’, whereby neither the US nor USSR would ‘hot’ war with each o ther because the resulting conflict would destroy much of the world.

Tuesday, August 20, 2019

Reverend John Hale in The Crucible

Reverend John Hale in The Crucible Reverend Hale, The Mentor The Character, Reverend Hale, is introduced into The Crucible as a very faithful and respected man. Swiftly being pulled into the ever broadening chaos that ensued in Salem. As days passed Hale is transformed from the man who will extract the witches to the man who will try to save Proctors life. Hale being both a mentor for the village and for Proctor while the story progresses while also keeping the peace. Hale being a 40 year old Reverend of the church and is told to have helped in the witch hunting in another much larger town is seen highly in salem. Reverend Hale is the classic Mentor archetype, whose strong faith but lack of political savvy hinders his ability to save the people of Salem. The Mentor archetype is profiled as His or her task is to protect the main character. (According to Literarydevives.net). Hale fits this perfectly, trying to protect John all along the way. Excellency, it is a natural lie to tell; I beg you, stop now before another is condemned! I may shut my conscience to it no more-Private vengeance is working through this testimony! From the beginning this man has struck me true. By my oath to Heaven, I believe him now, and I pray you call his wife back before we- He spoke on page 119 saying how Elizabeth had just tried to save his name when he went to call out Abigail on Harlotry. Another prime example was when he begged Danforth to not make him confess others on page 148 Excellency, it is enough he confess himself. Let him sign it, let him sign it. The final example was when he began to nearly plead with Elizabeth to beg him to sign it even though John made it extremely clear he wouldnt sign his name away on page 152 Woman, Plead with him! Woman ! It is pride, it is vanity. Be his Helper!-What profit him to bleed? Shall the dust praise him? Shall the worms declare his truth? Go to him, take his shame away!. In many ways does Hale fit the classic Mentor archetype, he helps the general populace and later Proctor since he cared so much. Reverend Hale has both strengths and weaknesses that show within the play. Hale shows how he has to rely on the court instead of intervening, like when he told Mr. Nurse on page 71 Believe me, Mr. Nurse, if Rebecca Nurse be tainted, then nothings left to stop the whole green world from burning. Let you rest upon the justice of the court; the court will send her home, I know it.. He also shows how he is well liked and his faith is very powerful. On page 36 the narration says about Hale He feels himself allied with the best minds of Europe kings, philosophers, scientists, and ecclesiastics of all churches. All in all Hale was quite a spiritually and faithfully strong character while also having weaknesses within the court in both inability to fight against the court and being fearful. The motivation of Hale resides within his Faith. The narrator says at one point His goal is light, goodness and its preservation, and he knows the exaltation of the blessed whose intelligence, sharpened by minute examinations of enormous tracts, is finally called upon to face what may be a bloody fight with the Fiend himself. One of the other good quotes to show his willingness to fight and drive out the evil is on page 39 where he says We shall find him out if he has come among us, and I mean to crush him utterly if he has shown his face! His willingness to help anyone and others is shown on page 46 Tituba, turn your back on him and face God-face God, Tituba, and God will protect you. he would even defend a slave. Hales motivation to help and to share the love of God with others, Hales will to help others trumps greed as he is willing to help even accused witches. The archetype of the Mentor perfectly fits for Hale, residing with his will to help others and his strong faith while also being undermined by his issues with the court. The Mentor archetype is based after someone who wants to help lead someone to their cause or is trying to help people in some way. Think of Hale much like other mentors, like Gandalf and Dumbledore, like Obi wan and Mace Windu. They all want to help the hero no matter what happens to them.Reverend Hale, The Mentor The Character, Reverend Hale, is introduced into The Crucible as a very faithful and respected man. Swiftly being pulled into the ever broadening chaos that ensued in Salem. As days passed Hale is transformed from the man who will extract the witches to the man who will try to save Proctors life. Hale being both a mentor for the village and for Proctor while the story progresses while also keeping the peace. Hale being a 40 year old Reverend of the church and is told to have helped in the witch hunting in another much larger town is seen highly in salem. Reverend Hale is the classic Mentor archetype, whose strong faith but lack of political savvy hinders his ability to save the people of Salem. The Mentor archetype is profiled as His or her task is to protect the main character. (According to Literarydevives.net). Hale fits this perfectly, trying to protect John all along the way. Excellency, it is a natural lie to tell; I beg you, stop now before another is condemned! I may shut my conscience to it no more-Private vengeance is working through this testimony! From the beginning this man has struck me true. By my oath to Heaven, I believe him now, and I pray you call his wife back before we- He spoke on page 119 saying how Elizabeth had just tried to save his name when he went to call out Abigail on Harlotry. Another prime example was when he begged Danforth to not make him confess others on page 148 Excellency, it is enough he confess himself. Let him sign it, let him sign it. The final example was when he began to nearly plead with Elizabeth to beg him to sign it even though John made it extremely clear he wouldnt sign his name away on page 152 Woman, Plead with him! Woman ! It is pride, it is vanity. Be his Helper!-What profit him to bleed? Shall the dust praise him? Shall the worms declare his truth? Go to him, take his shame away!. In many ways does Hale fit the classic Mentor archetype, he helps the general populace and later Proctor since he cared so much. Reverend Hale has both strengths and weaknesses that show within the play. Hale shows how he has to rely on the court instead of intervening, like when he told Mr. Nurse on page 71 Believe me, Mr. Nurse, if Rebecca Nurse be tainted, then nothings left to stop the whole green world from burning. Let you rest upon the justice of the court; the court will send her home, I know it.. He also shows how he is well liked and his faith is very powerful. On page 36 the narration says about Hale He feels himself allied with the best minds of Europe kings, philosophers, scientists, and ecclesiastics of all churches. All in all Hale was quite a spiritually and faithfully strong character while also having weaknesses within the court in both inability to fight against the court and being fearful. The motivation of Hale resides within his Faith. The narrator says at one point His goal is light, goodness and its preservation, and he knows the exaltation of the blessed whose intelligence, sharpened by minute examinations of enormous tracts, is finally called upon to face what may be a bloody fight with the Fiend himself. One of the other good quotes to show his willingness to fight and drive out the evil is on page 39 where he says We shall find him out if he has come among us, and I mean to crush him utterly if he has shown his face! His willingness to help anyone and others is shown on page 46 Tituba, turn your back on him and face God-face God, Tituba, and God will protect you. he would even defend a slave. Hales motivation to help and to share the love of God with others, Hales will to help others trumps greed as he is willing to help even accused witches. The archetype of the Mentor perfectly fits for Hale, residing with his will to help others and his strong faith while also being undermined by his issues with the court. The Mentor archetype is based after someone who wants to help lead someone to their cause or is trying to help people in some way. Think of Hale much like other mentors, like Gandalf and Dumbledore, like Obi wan and Mace Windu. They all want to help the hero no matter what happens to them.

Monday, August 19, 2019

Compare how visual images are used in Blessing and one other poem Essay

Compare how visual images are used in Blessing and one other poem (Vultures) to highlight political issues. The poet of Blessing Imtiaz Dharker and the poet of Vultures Chinua Achebe both use visual images to highlight the political issues in both poems. However both poems are very different from each other and contrast from of the poets’ views. The poem Blessing is about a water pipe bursting and how that is a blessing, as in the country they live in water is very limited and it doesn’t rain much in the country. The poem Vultures is about the evil of war and how evil always has good and good always has evil. The contrast in the two poems is Blessing is about Poverty and lack of water, whereas Vultures is about war and ethnic dying. In the poem Blessing the poet discusses the theme of third world poverty and the lack of water through using different language feature. For example line one â€Å"The skin cracks like a pod.† Using like in the sentence it shows that the poet is comparing dry skin to a pod, a pod dries out till it crack. There is also onomatopoeia used in this poem, â€Å"sliver crashes to the ground† crash is normally a negative onomatopoeia as the first thing that may come to our head may be car crash; however it is used as a positive as it is used with silver. Silver is a value metal and is precious, this shows how precious the water was to them. In the poem Vultures the poet discusses the theme of war and ethnic dying by using different language features. For example in Vultures the poet has used repetition of death and negative vocabulary a number of different times. â€Å"perching high on broken bone of a dead tree† in the phrase there are tow negative words. These negative words show that the Vul... ...g and Vultures to show the different political issues. In the poem Blessing visual images are portrayed about third world poverty, and in the poem Vultures it more about war a more political issue. Even though poverty is a political issue it could be easily stopped but would take a long time. War alternatively would take a long time and could also easily be. In contrast poverty could only be created by other countries it could also be created by the country it’s self. For example in the poem Vultures the commandment could stop imposing rules for others to follow, this would bring a stop to evil. However gathering the money to bring poverty to end would take a number of months. The in poem Blessing I thought the country may have been living in poverty for a number of years and didn’t have water for a number weeks. This could have lead to a number of deaths.

Career Biography of John Locke Essay examples -- John Locke Philosophe

English philosopher, who founded the school of empiricism. Locke was born in the village of Wrington, Somerset, on August 29, 1632. He was educated at the University of Oxford and lectured on Greek, rhetoric, and moral philosophy at Oxford from 1661 to 1664. In 1667 Locke began his association with the English statesman Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of Shaftesbury, to whom Locke was friend, adviser, and physician. Shaftesbury secured for Locke a series of minor government appointments. In 1669, in one of his official capacities, In 1675, after the liberal Shaftesbury lost is power, Locke went to France. In 1679 he returned to England, but in view of his opposition to the Roman Catholicism favored by the English monarchy at that time, he soon found it expedient to return to France. From 1683 to 1688 he lived in Holland, and following the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the restoration of Protestantism to favor, Locke returned once more to England. The new king, William III, appointed Locke to the Board of Trade in 1696, a position from which he resigned because of ill health in 1700. He died in Oates on October 28, 1704. Empiricism Locke's empiricism emphasizes the importance of the experience of the senses in pursuit of knowledge rather than speculation or reasoning. The empiricist doctrine was first developed by the English philosopher sir Francis Bacon early in the 17th century, but Locke organized his ideas in an article in 1690 called Essay Concerning ...

Sunday, August 18, 2019

One More River :: essays research papers

One More River Can you imagine having to leave everything you have ever known to live in a country on the verge of war? Lesley Shelby, the main character in One More River by Lynn Reid Banks, knows exactly how it feels. This Jewish Canadian girl has to emigrate to Israel with her family. Through the determination and courage of one person we see how challenges, complications, and differences of the world are overcome.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  In the story the most important character is Lesley. Lesley is a spoiled, pretty, Jewish, fourteen year old living in Canada. As the story progresses we see Lesley change to a caring and mature person by overcoming the differences in her new life. Two other important characters are Nat Shelby and Mustapha. Lesley’s father, Nat Shelby is the person who decided the family needed to live in Israel. Mr. Shelby decides he doesn’t want his daughter growing up as a spoiled uncaring princess. Mustapha, other important character, is an Arab boy who Lesley watches abuse his donkey across the Jordan River. All the Jews are not supposed to hate Arabs, but Lesley however comes in contact with Mustapha by the river and talks to him as a person not as an enemy. Mustapha made Lesley a more understanding person towards different kinds of people. The character I would most admire is Lesley for her ability to adapt to a new home, country and way of life.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Throughout the book there were many turning points. The war made Lesley really feel a part of Israel and the people. Another turning point was when Lesley was allowed to join the p’oola because she was finally excepted as one of them. The most important turning point is when Lesley, at the end of the book, takes the picture Mustapha threw at her and wrote “a peace between us and between our peoples'; in three languages and stuck it in the wall in Jerusalem. The major conflict in this story was moving to Israel because Lesley threw fits until she secretly visited Noah. (Lesley’s brother who was disowned because he married a catholic girl.) He told her to go and that’s when the conflict stopped. The plot enabled the characters to change. Lesley became excepting of life and the Arabs through events in the plot. In 1966 the Shelbys lived in Canada and then moved to a center in Israel were they had to learn Hebrew. One More River :: essays research papers One More River Can you imagine having to leave everything you have ever known to live in a country on the verge of war? Lesley Shelby, the main character in One More River by Lynn Reid Banks, knows exactly how it feels. This Jewish Canadian girl has to emigrate to Israel with her family. Through the determination and courage of one person we see how challenges, complications, and differences of the world are overcome.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  In the story the most important character is Lesley. Lesley is a spoiled, pretty, Jewish, fourteen year old living in Canada. As the story progresses we see Lesley change to a caring and mature person by overcoming the differences in her new life. Two other important characters are Nat Shelby and Mustapha. Lesley’s father, Nat Shelby is the person who decided the family needed to live in Israel. Mr. Shelby decides he doesn’t want his daughter growing up as a spoiled uncaring princess. Mustapha, other important character, is an Arab boy who Lesley watches abuse his donkey across the Jordan River. All the Jews are not supposed to hate Arabs, but Lesley however comes in contact with Mustapha by the river and talks to him as a person not as an enemy. Mustapha made Lesley a more understanding person towards different kinds of people. The character I would most admire is Lesley for her ability to adapt to a new home, country and way of life.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Throughout the book there were many turning points. The war made Lesley really feel a part of Israel and the people. Another turning point was when Lesley was allowed to join the p’oola because she was finally excepted as one of them. The most important turning point is when Lesley, at the end of the book, takes the picture Mustapha threw at her and wrote “a peace between us and between our peoples'; in three languages and stuck it in the wall in Jerusalem. The major conflict in this story was moving to Israel because Lesley threw fits until she secretly visited Noah. (Lesley’s brother who was disowned because he married a catholic girl.) He told her to go and that’s when the conflict stopped. The plot enabled the characters to change. Lesley became excepting of life and the Arabs through events in the plot. In 1966 the Shelbys lived in Canada and then moved to a center in Israel were they had to learn Hebrew.

Saturday, August 17, 2019

Key Success Factors for Online Advertising

Social Advertising Catherine Tucker? February 15, 2012 Abstract In social advertising, ads are targeted based on underlying social networks and their content is tailored with information that pertains to the social relationship. This paper explores the e? ectiveness of social advertising using data from ? eld tests of di? erent ads on Facebook. We ? nd evidence that social advertising is e? ective, and that this e? cacy seems to stem mainly from the ability of targeting based on social networks to uncover similarly responsive consumers.However, social advertising is less e? ective if the advertiser explicitly states they are trying to promote social in? uence in the text of their ad. This suggests that advertisers must avoid being overt in their attempts to exploit social networks in their advertising. Catherine Tucker is Associate Professor of Marketing at MIT Sloan School of Management, Cambridge, MA. and Faculty Research Fellow at the NBER. Thank-you to Google for ? nancial suppor t and to an anonymous non-pro? t for their cooperation.Thank-you to Jon Baker, Ann Kronrod, Preston Mcafee, and seminar participants at the George Mason University Roundtable on the Law and Economics of Internet Search, the University of Rochester, UCLA and Wharton for valuable comments. All errors are my own. ? 1 Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn. com/abstract=1975897 1 Introduction Recent advances on the internet have allowed consumers to interact across digital social networks. This is taking place at unprecedented levels: Facebook was the most visited website in the US in 2010, accounting for 20% of all time spent on the internet, a higher proportion than Google or Yahoo! ComScore, 2011). However, it is striking that traditional marketing communications have been at the periphery of this explosion of social data despite the documented power of social in? uence on purchasing behavior. Much of the emphasis on marketing in social media, so far, has been on the achievement o f ‘earned reach,’ whereby a brand builds its subscriber base organically and also hopes that this will in? uence others organically through sharing links with their social networks (Corcoran, 2009). However, recent research by Bakshy et al. 2011) has emphasized that this kind of organic sharing is far rarer than previously supposed, and that there are very few examples of a commercial message being consistently transmitted across social networks. Further, Tucker (2011a) shows that in order to achieve virality, an advertiser may have to sacri? ce the commercial e? ectiveness of their message. This means that advertisers may need to use paid advertising to facilitate the sharing of their commercial message through social networks. Both Facebook and LinkedIn have recently introduced a new form of advertising called ‘social advertising. A social ad is an online ad that ‘incorporates user interactions that the consumer has agreed to display and be shared. The res ulting ad displays these interactions along with the user’s persona (picture and/or name) within the ad content’ (IAB, 2009). This represents a radical technological development for advertisers, because it means that potentially they can co-opt the power of an individual’s social network to target advertising and engage their audience. This paper asks whether social advertising is e? ective, and what active steps advertisers themselves should take in their ads to promote social in? ence. 2 Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn. com/abstract=1975897 We explore the e? ectiveness of social ads using data from a ? eld experiment conducted on Facebook by a non-pro? t. This ? eld experiment compared the performance of social ads with conventionally targeted and untargeted ads. The social ads were targeted to the friends of ‘fans’ of the charity on Facebook. The ads featured that fan’s name and the fact that they had become a fan of this charity . We ? nd that on average these social ads were more e? ective than demographically targeted or untargeted ads.Further, this technique is useful for improving both the performance of demographically targeted and untargeted campaigns. Comparing the performance of these ads that contained the name of the fan and were targeted towards the fan’s friends with those that were simply targeted to that fan’s friends suggests that their e? ectiveness stems predominantly from the ability of social targeting to uncover similarly responsive consumers. We present results that suggest that as well as being more e? ective at gathering clicks, social advertising is also more e? ective at promoting actual subscriptions to the newsfeed and is more cost-e? ctive. We then turn to investigate how advertisers should word their social advertising. Through randomized ? eld tests, we investigate the e? ectiveness of advertisers deliberately promoting social in? uence in their advertising copy t hrough including a statement that encourages the viewer to, for example, ‘be like their friend. ’ We ? nd that consumers reject attempts by advertisers to explicitly harness or refer to a friend’s actions in their ad copy. This result contrasts with previous empirical research that ? nds consistent bene? ts to ? rms from highlighting previous consumer actions to positively in? ence the consumers’ response (Algesheimer et al. , 2010; Tucker and Zhang, 2011). This rejection is reasonably uniform across di? erent wording, though slightly less severe for ads that make a less explicit reference to friendship. We then present additional evidence to rule out two potential explanations for our ? ndings. First, we rule out that the overt mention of social in? uence simply made people aware they were seeing an ad rather than something organic to the site. We do this by comparing an ad that states it is an ad with an ad that does not, and ? nding no di? rence. 3 Seco nd, to investigate whether it was simply bad advertising copy, we examined how the ads perform for a group of Facebook users who have shown a visible propensity for social in? uence. We identify such users by whether or not they have a stated attachment to a ‘Fashion Brand’ on their Facebook pro? le. These users, in contrast to our earlier results, react more positively to the advertiser explicitly co-opting social in? uence than to a message that did not. This suggests that it was not simply that the message was badly communicated, but instead re? cts a taste (or more accurately distaste) for explicit references to social in? uence among most, though not all, consumers. This research builds on a literature that has studied the interplay between social networks and word of mouth. Zubcsek and Sarvary (2011) present a theoretical model that examines the e? ects of advertising to a social network, but assume that a ? rm cannot directly use the social network for marketing purposes. Instead, ? rms have to rely on consumers to organically pass their advertising message within the social networks. There has been little work on advertising in social networks.Previous studies in marketing about social network sites have questioned how such sites can use advertising to obtain members (Trusov et al. , 2009), and also how makers of applications designed to be used on social network sites can best advertise their products (Aral and Walker, 2011) through viral marketing. Hill et al. (2006) show that phone communications data can be used to predict who is more likely to adopt a service, Bagherjeiran et al. (2010) present a practical application where they use data from instant messaging logs at Yahoo! to improve online advertising targeting, and similarly Provost et al. 2009) show how to use browsing data to match groups of users who are socially similar. Tucker (2011b) explores how privacy controls mediate the e? ectiveness of advertising on Facebook. However, to our knowledge this is the ? rst academic study of the e? ectiveness of social advertising. Managerially, our results have important implications. Social advertising and the use of online social networks is e? ective. However, when advertisers attempt to reinforce this social 4 in? uence in ad copy, consumers appear less likely to respond positively to the ad. This is, to our knowledge, the ? st piece of empirical support for emerging managerial theories that emphasize the need for ? rms to not appear too obviously commercial when exploiting social media (Gossieaux and Moran, 2010). 5 2 Field Experiment The ? eld experiment was run by a small non-pro? t that provides educational scholarships for girls to attend high school in East Africa. Without the intervention of this non-pro? t, and other non-pro? ts like them, girls do not attend secondary school because their families prioritize the education of sons. Though the non-pro? t’s main mission is funding these educational scholarships, the non-pro? has a secondary mission which is to inform young people in the US about the state of education for African girls. It was in aid of this secondary mission that the non-pro? t set up a Facebook page. This page serves as a repository of interviews with girls where they describe the challenges they have faced. To launch the ? eld experiment, the non-pro? t followed the procedure described in ‘A/B Testing your Facebook Ads: Getting better results through experimentation’ (Facebook, 2010) which involved setting up multiple competing campaigns. These ad campaigns was targeted to three di? erent groups as shown in Table 1. The ? st group was a broad untargeted campaign for all Facebook users aged 18 and older in the US. The second group were people who had already expressed interest in other charities. These people were identi? ed using Facebook’s ‘broad category targeting’ of ‘Charity + Causes. ’ The third group were people who had already expressed an interest in ‘Education + Teaching. ’ Previously, the charity had tried such reasonably broad targeting with little success and was hopeful that social advertising would improve the ads’ performance (Tucker, 2011b). In all cases, the charity explicitly excluded current fans from seeing its ads.For each of these groups of Facebook users, the non-pro? t launched a socially targeted variant. These ads employed the Facebook ad option that meant that they were targeted only to users who were friends of existing fans of the charity. This also meant that when the fan had not opted-out on Facebook, the ad also displayed a ‘social endorsement’ where the name of the friend was shown at the bottom of the ad as shown in Figure 1. 6 Table 1: Di? erent Groups Targeted Condition Untargeted Baseline: Only Shown Baseline text All people in US over age of 18 who are not fans of the non-pro? t already.All people in US over age of 18 w ho state a? nity with charities on their Facebook pro? le who are not fans of the non-pro? t already. All people in US over age of 18 who state a? nity with education on their Facebook pro? le who are not fans of the non-pro? t already. Social Variant: Shown all 5 texts from Table 2 All people in US over age of 18 who are friends of the non-pro? t’s supporters who are not fans of the non-pro? t already. All people in US over age of 18 who state a? nity with charities on their Facebook pro? le who are friends of the non-pro? t’s supporters who are not fans of the nonpro? already. All people in US over age of 18 who state a? nity with education on their Facebook pro? le who are friends of the non-pro? t’s supporters who are not fans of the nonpro? t already. Charity Education The non-pro? t varied whether the campaign was demographically targeted and whether the campaign was socially targeted, and also explored di? erent ad-text conditions. Table 2 describes the d i? erent ad-copy for each condition. Each di? erent type of ad-copy was accompanied by the same picture of an appealing secondary-school student who had bene? ted from their program.The socially targeted ads displayed all ? ve variants of the advertising message depicted in Table 2. For each of the non-socially-targeted campaigns, we ran the baseline variant of the ad text which, as shown in Table 2, simply says ‘Help girls in East Africa change their lives through education. ’ The non-pro? t could not run the other four conditions that refer to others’ actions, because federal regulations require ads to be truthful and they did not want to mislead potential supporters. The di? erent ad conditions were broadly designed to cover the kinds of normative and informational social in? ence described by Deutsch and Gerard (1955); Burnkrant and Cousineau (1975). 1 We want to be clear that we do not argue that these advertising measures 1 Other forms of social in? uence s tudied in the literature involve network externalities where there is a performance bene? t to multiple people adopting (Tucker, 2008). However, that does not seem to be relevant 7 Table 2: Di? erent Ad-Text Conditions Condition Baseline Be like your friend Ad-Text Help girls in East Africa change their lives through education. Be like your friend.Help girls in East Africa change their lives through education. Don’t be left out. Help girls in East Africa change their lives through education. Your friend knows this is a good cause. Help girls in East Africa change their lives through education. Learn from your friend. Help girls in East Africa change their lives through education. Don’t be left out. Your friend knows Learn from your friend. capture all types of social in? uence or are necessarily successful at distinguishing between the di? erent types of social in? uence that are possible. The literature on social in? ence has emphasized that the underlying mechanism i s nuanced and complex. Obviously, di? erent types of social in? uence relate and interact in ways that cannot be teased apart simply with di? erent wording. However, the variation in messages does allow us to study whether explicit advertising messages that attempt to use di? erent types of wording to evoke social in? uence are e? ective in general. Figure 1: Sample Ad Figure 1 displays an anonymized sample ad for a social ad in the ‘be like your friend’ condition. The blacked-out top of the ad contained the non-pro? t’s name. The grayedhere. out bottom of the ad contained a supporter’s name, who had ‘liked’ the charity and was a Facebook friend of the person who was being advertised to. It is only with developments in technology and the development of automated algorithms that such individualized display of the friend’s name when pertinent is possible. Table 3 describes the demographics of the roughly 1,500 fans at the beginning of the campaign. Though the initial fans were reasonably spread out across di? erent age cohorts, they were more female than the average population, which makes sense given the nature of the charity.At the end of the experiment, the fans were slightly more likely to be male than before. The way that Facebook reports data means that we have access to the demographics only of the fans of the charity, not of those who were advertised to. Table 3: Demographics of the non-pro? t’s fans before and after the ? eld experiment Age 18-24 25-34 35-44 45-54 55+ Total Before Male 5 5 6 3 3 22 Experiment After Experiment Female Male Female 13 8 14 14 6 14 17 6 16 13 3 13 10 4 10 67 27 67 The ‘Total’ row does not add up to 100% because fans who are below 18 years of age are omitted. 9 3 DataThe data that Facebook shares with advertisers is both anonymous and aggregate. This means that we cannot trace the e? ects of social advertising on the friends of any one individual. It also mean s that we cannot examine heterogeneity in the degrees of in? uence across individuals, as is studied, for example, by Godes and Mayzlin (2009) in their study of o? ine ? rm-sponsored communications. However, given that the central research question of the study is whether, on average, di? erent types of social advertising are more e? ective, the aggregate nature of the data is su? cient.Table 4 reports daily summary statistics for the campaigns in our data. Over a 5-week period, there were 630 observations. There were 18 campaigns in total that consisted of a) The three baseline conditions that were demographically targeted to everyone, charity-lovers and education-supporters and used the baseline text, and b) The ? fteen social ad conditions that had all the ? ve di? erent types of text, and socially targeted separately to everyone, charity-lovers and education-supporters. Table A2 in the appendix provides a summary of these campaigns. Table 4: Summary Statistics Mean Std Dev Min M ax Average Impressions 13815. 13898. 6 1 98037 Average Clicks 5. 06 5. 17 0 37 Connections 2. 70 3. 52 0 24 Unique Clicks 5. 04 5. 14 0 36 Daily Click Rate 0. 11 0. 10 0 1. 27 Impression Click Rate 0. 045 0. 047 0 0. 50 Cost Per Click (USD) 0. 98 0. 40 0. 31 3. 90 Cost Per 1000 views (USD) 0. 52 1. 37 0 24. 5 Ad-Reach 6165. 7 6185. 0 1 60981 Frequency 2. 32 0. 82 1 9. 70 18 ad variants at the daily level for 5 weeks (630 observations) There are two click-through rates reported in Table 4. The ? rst click-through rate is the proportion of people who clicked on an ad that day. The denominator here is the 10Ad-Reach measure that captures the number of people exposed to an ad each day. The second click-through rate is per ad impression. We focus on the former in our econometric analysis, because impressions can be a function of person refreshing their page or using the back button on the browser or other actions which do not necessarily lead to increased exposure to the ad. We show robu stness subsequently to using this click-through rate per impression measure. Due to the relatively small number of clicks, these click through rates are expressed as percentage points or sometimes as fractions of a percentage point.In our regression analysis we also use this scaling in order to make our coe? cients more easily readable. 2 The data also contains an alternative means of measuring advertising success. The connection rate measures the number of people who liked a Facebook page within 24 hours of seeing a sponsored ad, where the denominator is the ad’s reach that day. We compare this measure to clicks in subsequent analysis to check that the click-through rate is capturing something meaningful. We also use the cost data about how much the advertiser paid for each of these ads in a robustness check.The data reassuringly suggests that there were only ? ve occasions where someone clicked twice on the ads. Therefore, 99. 8% of the click-through rate we measure capture s a single individual clicking on the ad. 2 11 Figure 2: Social advertising is e? ective 4 4. 1 Results Does Social Advertising Work? First, we present some simple evidence about whether social advertising is more e? ective than regular display advertising. Figure 2 displays the basic comparison of aggregate (that is, across the whole ? ve-week period) click-through rates between non-socially-targeted ads and ads that were socially targeted.Since these are aggregate click-through rates they di? er from the daily click-through rates reported in Table 4. These are expressed as fractions of a percentage point. It is clear that social advertising earned far larger click-through rates. The di? erence between the two bars is quite striking. To check the robustness and statistical signi? cance of this relationship, we turn to econometrics. The econometric analysis is relatively straightforward because of the randomization induced by the ? eld tests. We model the click-through rate of campa ign j on day t targeted to demographic group k as: 2 ClickRatejt = ? SocialT argeting Endorsementj + ? k + ? t + j (1) SocialT argeting Endorsementj is an indicator for whether or not this campaign variance was socially targeted and displayed the endorsement. Since Facebook does not allow the testing of these di? erent features separately, this is a combined (rather than separable) indicator. ?k is a ? xed e? ect that captures whether this was the untargeted variant of the ad. This controls for underlying systematic di? erences in how likely people within that target and untargeted segment were to respond to this charity.We include a vector of date dummies ? t . Because the ads are randomized, ? t and ? k should primarily improve e? ciency. We estimate the speci? cation using ordinary least squares. Though we recognize that theoretically a click-through rate is bounded at one hundred since it is measured in percentage points, click-through rates in our data are never close to this u pper bound or lower bound. 3 Table 5 reports our initial results. Column (1) presents results for the simple speci? cation implied by equation (1) but without the date and demographic controls.The point estimates suggest that social targeting and a friend’s endorsement increased the average daily clickthrough rate by around half. Column (2) repeats the analysis with the controls for date. It suggests that after controlling for date, the result holds. This is reassuring and suggests that any unevenness in how ads were served across days does not drive our results. It also suggests that our result is not an artifact of a failure of randomization. Column (3) adds an extra coe? cient that indicates whether that campaign was untargeted rather than being targeted to one of the customer groups identi? d as being likely ‘targets’ by the non-pro? t We also tried alternative speci? cations where we use the unbounded clicks measure (rather than a rate) as the dependent vari able and show that our results are robust to such a speci? cation in Table A1, in the appendix. 3 13 – Educational and Charity supporters. It suggests that indeed, as expected, an untargeted campaign was weakly ine? ective, though the estimate is not signi? cant at conventional levels. We speculate that the apparent weakness of demographic targeting may be because target markets of charity and educational supporters is reasonably broad, and consequently may have ontained many individuals who would not support an international charity. An obvious question is what explains the success of social advertising. One explanation is that the endorsement of a friend is informative. Another explanation is that social targeting uncovers people who will be more likely to be interested in their charity as they are similar, in unobserved ways, to their friends who are already fans of the charity. Manski (1993) pointed out that this particular issue of distinguishing homophily (unobserved ch aracteristics that make friends behave in a similar way) from the explicit in? ence of friends on each other is empirically problematic. Ideally, to address this we would simply randomize whether users saw the endorsement or not. However, Facebook’s advertiser interface does not allow that. What we can do is take advantage of the fact that sometimes ads are shown to people without the endorsement if that fan has selected a privacy setting which restricts the use of their image and name. The interface which users use to do this is displayed in Figure A1; all users do is simply select the ‘No One’ rather than the ‘Only my friends’ option.Of course, this will not represent perfect randomization. It is likely that the fans who select stricter privacy settings di? er in unobserved ways from those who do not, and that therefore their social networks may di? er as well. However, despite this potential for bias, this does represent a useful opportunity to tr y to disentangle the power of social targeting to enable homophily and the power of personal endorsements. Column (4) displays the results of a speci? cation for equation (1) where the dependent variable is the conversion rate for these socially targeted but not socially endorsed ads.Here for ads that were being shown to friends, the click-through rate was only calculated for occasions when the endorsement was not shown. A comparison of Column 14 (3) and Column (4) in Table 5 makes it clear the ads that were displayed to friends of fans but lacked a clear endorsement were less e? ective than those that had a clear endorsement. However, they were still measurably more e? ective than non-socially-targeted ads. It appears that, roughly, the endorsement accounted for less than half of the persuasive e? ect and the ability to use social networks to target the ad accounted for slightly more than half of such ads’ e? acy. Columns (5) and (6) of Table 5 estimate the speci? cation sep arately by whether the campaign was targeted or untargeted. Though the point estimate for the targeted campaigns is higher, it is notable that social advertising improved the performance of both targeted and untargeted campaigns. Given the widely reported lack of e? cacy of untargeted campaigns (Reiley and Lewis, 2009), the increase in e? ectiveness allowed by social advertising appears large for untargeted campaigns. 15 Table 5: Social Targeting and Endorsement is E? ective (4) No Endorsement Click Rate SocialTargeting EndorsementAll (1) Click Rate 0. 0386 (0. 0123) (2) Click Rate 0. 0385 (0. 0108) 0. 0287 (0. 0143) -0. 000275 (0. 0122) 0. 0794 (0. 0116) 0. 0132 (0. 0166) (3) Click Rate 0. 0386 (0. 0125) Untargeted (5) Click Rate 0. 0297 (0. 00755) Targeted (6) Click Rate 0. 0376 (0. 00927) SocialTargeting Untargeted Constant 16 Date Controls No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Observations 630 630 630 630 210 420 Log-Likelihood 542. 1 610. 3 610. 3 427. 8 187. 7 452. 3 R-Squared 0. 0221 0. 212 0. 212 0. 119 0. 317 0. 228 OLS Estimates. Dependent variable is the percentage point of people who click on the ad.Dependent variable in Columns (4) for social ads is the percentage point daily click-through rate of ads that did not display the endorsement. Robust standard errors. * p < 0. 10, ** p < 0. 05, *** p < 0. 01 4. 2 Robustness Table 6 checks the robustness of the ? nding that social targeting and endorsement are effective, to di? erent de? nitions of the dependent variable. Column (1) reports the results of using a dependent measure which is the percentage click-through per impression. Again, we ? nd that social advertising is more e? ective, though the e? ectiveness is less pronounced and less precisely estimated than before.This suggests that the appeal of social advertising is not necessarily enhanced by multiple exposure. It could also, of course, merely re? ect noise introduced into the process by someone refreshing their browser multiple times. The results so far s uggest that consumer privacy concerns or the intrusiveness of such ads do not seem to outweigh the appeal of social advertising for consumers. 4 There is always the possibility of course that people clicked on the ads because they were annoyed or wanted to understand more the extent of privacy intrusion rather than because the ads were actually e? ective.To explore this, we estimate a speci? cation where the dependent measure was the proportion of clicks that became subscribers of the newsfeed. The results are reported in Column (2). We see that again social advertising appears to be more e? ective at encouraging Facebook users to take the intended action as well as simply clicking. This is evidence that people are not clicking on social ads due to annoyance at their intrusiveness but instead are clicking on them and taking the action the ads intend to encourage them to take. Untargeted ads are less likely to lead to conversions than those targeted at appropriate demographics.This m akes sense – these people are being targeted precisely because they are the kind of people who have signed up for such news feeds in the past. A ? nal question is whether ads that are socially targeted and display endorsements are more expensive for advertisers, thereby wiping out their relative e? ectiveness in terms of return on advertising investment. We explore this in Column (3) of Table 6. There are This may be because Facebook users ? nd it reassuring that these ads, though narrowly targeted, are not overly visually intrusive (Goldfarb and Tucker, 2011). 4 17 everal missing observations where there were no clicks that day and consequently there was no price recorded. In Column (3), we report the results of a speci? cation where our explanatory variables is the relative price per click. The results suggest that advertisers pay less for these clicks that are socially targeted. This suggests that Facebook is not charging a premium for this kind of advertising. Though Face book shrouds in secrecy the precise pricing and auction mechanism underlying their advertising pricing, this result would be consistent with a mechanism whereby advertisers pay less for clicks if they have higher clickthrough rates.In other words, prices paid bene? t from an improved ‘quality-score’ (Athey and Nekipelov, 2011). The results also suggest that advertisers pay less for demographically untargeted clicks which is in line with previous studies such as Beales (2010). Table 6: Social Advertising is E? ective: Checking robustness to di? erent dependent variables SocialTargeting Endorsement (1) Click Rate (Multiple) 0. 0108 (0. 00501) 0. 00526 (0. 00582) Yes 630 1086. 5 0. 150 (2) Clicks to Connections Rate 0. 433 (0. 0997) -0. 321 (0. 0768) Yes 554 -467. 5 0. 163 (3) Cost Per Click (USD) -0. 95 (0. 0480) -0. 177 (0. 0520) Yes 559 -129. 0 0. 426 Untargeted Date Controls Observations Log-Likelihood R-Squared OLS Estimates. Dependent variable is the click-through ra te (expressed as a fraction of a percentage point) for impressions in Column (1). Dependent variable in Column (2) is the clicks to conversions rate. Dependent variable in Column (3) is cost per click. Robust standard errors. * p < 0. 10, ** p < 0. 05, *** p < 0. 01 4. 3 What Kind of Social Advertising Messages Work? We then go on to explore what kind of advertising message works in social ads.We distinguish between ads that rely simply on the Facebook algorithm to promote social in? uence by featuring the automated endorsement at the bottom of their ad, and ads that explicitly refer to this endorsement in their ad copy. 18 Table 7: Social Advertising is Less E? ective if an Advertiser is Too Explicit (3) No Endorsement Click Rate SocialTargeting Endorsement All (1) Click Rate 0. 0577 (0. 0139) (2) Click Rate 0. 0571 (0. 0113) 0. 0333 (0. 0168) -0. 0287 (0. 00886) -0. 000463 (0. 0122) -0. 0136 (0. 0115) -0. 0189? (0. 01000) -0. 0378 (0. 0115) -0. 0429 (0. 0144) -0. 101 (0. 0124) Yes 630 615. 4 0. 225 Yes 630 618. 1 0. 232 Yes 630 429. 5 0. 124 Yes 210 189. 6 0. 329 Yes 420 461. 0 0. 260 -0. 000281 (0. 0177) 0. 0161 (0. 0169) -0. 0303? (0. 0167) -0. 0284 (0. 0124) Untargeted (4) Click Rate 0. 0498 (0. 0245) Targeted (5) Click Rate 0. 0527 (0. 0130) SocialTargeting SocialTargeting Endorsement ? Explicit Untargeted SocialTargeting Endorsement ? Don’t be left out SocialTargeting Endorsement ? Be like your friend SocialTargeting Endorsement ? Learn from your friend 19 SocialTargeting Endorsement ? Your friend knows SocialTargeting ? ExplicitDate Controls Observations Log-Likelihood R-Squared OLS Estimates. Dependent variable is the percentage points of people who click on the ad. Dependent variable in Columns (3) adjusted for social ads so that is the percentage point daily click-through rate of ads that did not display the endorsement. Robust standard errors. * p < 0. 10, ** p < 0. 05, *** p < 0. 01 We use the additional binary indicator variable Explicitj to indicate when the advertiser uses a message that evokes social in? uence explicitly in their ad copy, in addition to the social endorsement automated by the Facebook algorithm.This covers all the non-baseline conditions described in Table 2. We interact this with the SocialT argeting Endorsementj , meaning that SocialT argeting Endorsementj now measures the e? ect of the baseline effect, and the interacted variable measures the incremental advantage or disadvantage of mentioning the friend or the potential for social in? uence in the ad. Column (1) of Table 7 reports the results. The negative coe? cient on the interaction between Explicit and SocialT argeting Endorsementj suggests that explicit reference to a social in? uence mechanism in the ad a? ected the performance of the ad negatively.That is, when the advertiser themselves were explicit about their intention to harness social in? uence, it back? res. Further, the large point estimate for SocialT argeting Endorsementj sugge sts that the baseline message is even more e? ective than the estimates of Table 5 suggested. Column (2) in Table 7 reports the results of a speci? cation where we break up Explicit by the di? erent types of ‘social in? uence’-focused advertising messages featured in Table 2. It is striking that all measures are negative. It is also suggestive that the one message that was not statistically signi? ant and had a smaller point estimate than the others did not refer to the friend explicitly but instead referred obliquely to the friend’s action. This is speculative, since the point estimate here is not statistically di? erent from the others due to its large standard error. Column (3) repeats the exercise for the click-through rate for the ads that did not display an endorsement that we investigated in Table 5. Since these ads did not display the friend’s name at the bottom, it should not be so obvious to a viewer that the ? rm is explicitly trying to harness the social in? uence that results from the friend being a fan of the charity.We recognize that there may of course be some confusion at the mention of a friend when no name is displayed, but this confusion should work against us rather than for us. In this case, 20 we do not see a negative and signi? cant e? ect of the ‘Explicit’ advertising message which referred to a friend. This suggests that it was the combination of the friend’s name and the mention of social in? uence which was particularly o? -putting. The results in Column (3) suggest that what is damaging is the combination of an advertiser making it explicit they are trying to harness social in? ence and the algorithmic social advertising message. We next explored whether this ? nding that attempts by advertisers to explicitly harness social in? uence in their ad text damaged the e? ectiveness of social advertising di? ered by the target group selected. Column (4) presents the results for the campaign t hat was targeted at friends of fans who were simply over 18 years old and based in the US. Column (5) presents the results for the group of users whom the charity selected as being in the target ‘demographic’ groups for the campaign – that is users whose Facebook pro? e revealed their support for other educational and charitable causes. What is striking is the similarity of the estimates for the e? cacy of social advertising and the damage done by the advertiser being overly explicit about social in? uence across Columns (4) and (5). Again, similar to the results reported in Table 5 social advertising appears to be able to o? er as nearly as large a lift to ad e? cacy for an untargeted population as a targeted one. 4. 4 Behavioral Mechanism We then collected additional data to help rule out alternative explanations of our ? nding that the explicit mention of social in? ence was undesirable in social ads. One obvious potential explanation is that what we are measu ring is simply that people are unaware that what they are seeing is actually an ad, rather than part of Facebook. When a non-pro? t uses a message such as ‘Be like your friend’ then it becomes obvious that this is an ad, and people respond di? erently. To test this, we persuaded the non-pro? t to run a subsequent experiment that allowed us to explicitly tease this apart. In this experiment we compared the performance of ads that said ‘Please read this ad. Help girls in East Africa 21 change their lives through education. , and ads that simply said ‘Help girls in East Africa change their lives through education. ’5 If it is was the case that Facebook users were simply mistaking socially targeted ads for regular content and the explicit appeals to social in? uence stopped them making this mistake, we would expect to also see a negative e? ect of wording that made it clear that the message was an ad. However, it appears that adding ‘Please read thi s ad’ if anything helped ad performance, which suggests that it was not the case that Facebook users were simply mistaking socially targeted ads for content if there is no explicit message.Obviously, though, the sample size here is very small, making more de? nitive pronouncements unwise. Table 8: Not Driven by Lack of Awareness of Advertising or Universally Unappealing Ad Copy Knowledge (1) Click Rate 0. 0312? (0. 0160) 0. 0114 (0. 0288) Fashion (2) Click Rate 0. 0194 (0. 0208) 0. 0376? (0. 0221) 0. 0449? (0. 0254) -0. 00448 (0. 0218) 0. 0172 (0. 0254) 0. 127 (0. 0584) (3) Click Rate 0. 0182 (0. 0208) SocialTargeting Endorsement SocialTargeting Endorsement ? Explicit SocialTargeting Endorsement ? Don’t be left out SocialTargeting Endorsement Be like your friend SocialTargeting Endorsement ? Learn from your friend SocialTargeting Endorsement ? Your friend knows Date Controls Yes Yes Yes Observations 20 60 60 Log-Likelihood 55. 43 91. 77 103. 7 R-Squared 0. 916 0. 267 0 . 508 OLS Estimates. Dependent variable is the percentage point of people who click on ad that day. Robust standard errors. * p < 0. 10, ** p < 0. 05, *** p < 0. 01 Recent research has questioned the use of the imperative in advertising copy, which is why we used ‘please’ (Kronrod et al. , 2012) 5 22 Another alternative explanation for our ? dings is that the messages referring to the friend were poorly-written or unappealing. To test whether this was the case, we selected an alternative set of users whom might be expected to react in an opposite way to potential presumptions of social in? uence. Speci? cally, the charity agreed to run test conditions identical to those in Table 2 for the people who expressed a? nity with ‘Fashion’ goods on their Facebook pro? les. The Fashion category of users were chosen because typical models of social in? uence have focused on fashion cycles (Bikhchandani et al. , 1992).These models emphasize the extent to which people who participate in Fashion cycles receive explicit utility from conformity, even when this conformity is provoked by a ? rm. In other words, they may ? nd advertiser-endorsed social in? uence more persuasive and advertiser attempts at emphasizing the power of social in? uence more acceptable than the general population does. This group of users exhibits a very di? erent pattern to that exhibited by the general population. They appear to respond somewhat positively to social advertising, though this estimate is imprecise and the point estimate is smaller than for the other conditions.However, strikingly, they reacted particularly positively to advertising messages that emphasized social in? uence and the actions of the friend in the ad copy. In other words, social advertising for this group worked even when the advertiser explicitly embraced the potential for social in? uence. This result suggests that there may be heterogeneity in consumer responses to the wording of social advertis ing messages depending on their previous consumption patterns. This is evidence against an alternative explanation for our results in Table 7 based on these advertising messages which explicitly refer to the potential for social in? ence being confusing or overly wordy, since they were e? ective for this group of Fashion fans. In general, the results of Tables 7 and 8 suggest that there is heterogeneity in distaste for advertiser attempts to harness social in? uence given previous consumption patterns, but that for the average person the e? ects are negative. 23 5 Implications How helpful is data on social relationships when it comes to targeting and delivering advertising content? This paper answers this question using ? eld test data of di? erent ads on the large social network site Facebook. We ? nd evidence that social advertising is indeed very e? ctive. This is important, as for the past few years social network websites have often been dismissed by advertisers as venues for à ¢â‚¬Ëœpaid media’, that is, paid advertising. Instead, the emphasis was on ‘earned’ or organic media whereby social networks were venues for organic word of mouth. This dismissal of paid advertisements was echoed in the popular and marketing press with headlines such as ‘Online Social Network and Advertising Don’t Mix’ and ‘Facebook Ad Click-Through Rates Are Really Pitiful’ (Joel, 2008; Barefoot and Szabo, 2008). Our results suggest, however, that as social advertising develops this will change swiftly.In particular, social networks will be able to exploit their considerable inherent network e? ects to enlarge their share of advertising dollars. Strikingly, we ? nd that the average Facebook user appears to ? nd social advertising as done by the standard Facebook algorithm appealing. However, when advertisers attempt to emulate or reinforce this social in? uence, consumers appear less likely to respond positively to the ad. Specul atively, the results suggest that intrusive or highly personal advertising is more acceptable if done algorithmically by a faceless entity uch as a computer than when it is the result of evident human agency. Very speculatively, there is perhaps a parallel with users of web-based email programs accepting an algorithm scanning their emails to serve them relevant ads when the interception of emails by a human agent would not be acceptable. Our results suggest that social advertising works well for both targeted and untargeted populations, which may mean that social advertising is a particularly useful technique when 24 advertising to consumers outside the product’s natural or obvious market segment since their are less obvious ways of targeting in these settings.The majority of this e? cacy appears to be because social targeting uncovers unobserved homophily between users of a website and their underlying receptiveness to an advertising message. There are of course limitations to our study. First, the non-pro? t setting may bias our results in ways that we cannot predict. Second, the aims of the non-pro? t also means the outcome measure we study is whether or not people sign up to hear more about the nonpro? t, rather than studying the direct e? ect of advertising on for-pro? t outcomes such as customers making purchases.Third, we studied this advertising at a time when Facebook was just launching and promoting its social advertising features. It is not clear whether the results will be as strong if the advertising market becomes saturated with social ads. Notwithstanding these limitations, we believe that this paper makes a useful contribution in terms of documenting when social advertising is useful and when it is not. 25 References Algesheimer, R. , S. Borle, U. M. Dholakia, and S. S. Singh (July/August 2010). The impact of customer community participation on customer behaviors: An empirical investigation.Marketing Science 29 (4), 756–769. Aral, S. and D. Walker (September 2011). Creating social contagion through viral product design: A randomized trial of peer in? uence in networks. Management Science 57 (9), 1623–1639. Athey, S. and D. Nekipelov (2011). A structural model of sponsored search advertising auctions. Mimeo, Berkeley. Bagherjeiran, A. , R. P. Bhatt, R. Parekh, and V. Chaoji (2010). Online advertising in social networks. In B. Furht (Ed. ), Handbook of Social Network Technologies and Applications, pp. 651–689. Springer US. Bakshy, E. , J. M. Hofman, W. A. Mason, and D. J. Watts (2011). Everyone’s an in? encer: quantifying in? uence on Twitter. In Proceedings of the fourth ACM international conference on Web search and data mining, WSDM ’11, New York, NY, USA, pp. 65–74. ACM. Barefoot, D. and J. Szabo (2008, April). Facebook ad click-through rates are really pitiful. Friends with Bene? ts: A social media handbook blog. Beales, H. (2010). The value of behavioral targeting. Mime o, George Washington University. Bikhchandani, S. , D. Hirshleifer, and I. Welch (1992, October). A theory of fads, fashion, custom, and cultural change in informational cascades. Journal of Political Economy 100 (5), 992–1026. 6 Burnkrant, R. E. and A. Cousineau (1975, December). Informational and normative social in? uence in buyer behavior. Journal of Consumer Research 2 (3), 206–15. ComScore (2011). ComScore’s 2011 social report: Facebook leading, microblogging growing, world connecting. White Paper . Corcoran, S. (2009, December 16). De? ning earned, owned and paid media. Forrester Research. Deutsch, M. and H. B. Gerard (1955). A study of normative and informational social in? uences upon individual judgment. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 51 (3), 629–636. Facebook (2010, September).A/B testing your Facebook ads: Getting better results through experimentation’. Technical Report. Godes, D. and D. Mayzlin (2009). Firm-Created Word -of-Mouth Communication: Evidence from a Field Test. Marketing Science 28 (4), 721–739. Goldfarb, A. and C. Tucker (2011, May). Online display advertising: Targeting and obtrusiveness. Marketing Science 30, 389–404. Gossieaux, F. and E. Moran (2010). The Hyper-Social Organization: Eclipse Your Competition by Leveraging Social Media. McGraw-Hill. Hill, S. , F. Provest, and C. Volinksky (2006). Network-based marketing: Identifying likely adopters via consumer networks.Statistical Science 21 (2), 256276. IAB (2009). IAB social advertising best practices. Interactive Advertising Bureau. Joel, M. (2008, February 8). Online social networks and advertising don’t mix. Six Pixels of Separation, Twist Image. 27 Kronrod, A. , A. Grinstein, and L. Wathieu (2012, January). Go green! Should environmental messages be so assertive? Journal of Marketing 76, 95–102. Manski, C. F. (1993, July). Identi? cation of endogenous social e? ects: The re? ection problem. Review of E conomic Studies 60 (3), 531–42. Provost, F. , B. Dalessandro, R. Hook, X. Zhang, and A. Murray (2009).Audience selection for on-line brand advertising: privacy-friendly social network targeting. In Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining, KDD ’09, New York, NY, USA, pp. 707–716. ACM. Reiley, D. and R. Lewis (2009). Retail advertising works! measuring the e? ects of advertising on sales via a controlled experiment on Yahoo! †. Working Paper, Yahoo! Research. Trusov, M. , R. E. Bucklin, and K. Pauwels (2009, September). E? ects of word-of-mouth versus traditional marketing: Findings from an internet social networking site.Journal of Marketing 73, 90–102. Tucker, C. (2008). Identifying formal and informal in? uence in technology adoption with network externalities. Management Science 54 (12), 2024–2038. Tucker, C. (2011a). Ad virality and ad persuasiveness. Mimeo, MIT . Tucker, C. (2011b ). Mimeo, MIT . Tucker, C. and J. Zhang (2011). How does popularity information a? ect choices? A ? eld experiment. Management Science 57 (5), 828–842. Zubcsek, P. and M. Sarvary (2011). Advertising to a social network. Quantitative Marketing and Economics 9, 71–107. Social Networks, Personalized Advertising, and Privacy Controls. 28Figure A1: Control interface for switching o? Endorsement A-1 Table A1: Robustness of Table 5 to using number of clicks as dependent variable OLS (1) Average Clicks SocialTargeting Endorsement 1. 991 (0. 394) -0. 0385 (0. 422) 0. 000405 (0. 0000443) Poisson (2) Average Clicks 0. 258 (0. 0746) 0. 134 (0. 0817) 0. 0000327 (0. 00000638) Negative Binomial (3) Average Clicks 0. 230 (0. 0922) 0. 187 (0. 123) 0. 0000455 (0. 0000135) Untargeted Ad-Reach Date Controls Yes Yes Yes Observations 630 630 630 Log-Likelihood -1484. 8 -1417. 6 -1394. 7 R-Squared 0. 755 OLS Estimates in Columns (1)-(2).Dependent variable is the Number of clicks on the ad in Columns (3)-(4). Robust standard errors. * p < 0. 10, ** p < 0. 05, *** p < 0. 01 A-2 Table A2: Summary of 18 Campaigns Campaign 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 Social Ad? Social Advertising Social Advertising Social Advertising Social Advertising Social Advertising Social Advertising Social Advertising Social Advertising Social Advertising Social Advertising Social Advertising Social Advertising Social Advertising Social Advertising Social Advertising Non-Social Advertising Non-Social Advertising Non-Social Advertising Demo Targeting?Demo 1 Targeted Demo 1 Targeted Demo 1 Targeted Demo 1 Targeted Demo 1 Targeted Demo 2 Targeted Demo 2 Targeted Demo 2 Targeted Demo 2 Targeted Demo 2 Targeted Untargeted Untargeted Untargeted Untargeted Untargeted Demo 1 Targeted Demo 2 Targeted Untargeted Message Baseline Message 1 Message 2 Message 3 Message 4 Baseline Message 1 Message 2 Message 3 Message 4 Baseline Message 1 Message 2 Message 3 Message 4 Baseline Baseline Baseline A- 3