Advertising Content and Avoidance, New Media or Old Media, and Media Coverage of Celebrity Suicides

This issue of Journal of Media Economics includes three articles covering a wide range of mediarelated topics. All three articles have important implications for media firms, from advertisers to traditional media content providers. These articles also raise important points in a larger publicpolicy sense, as well. The first article is “Advertising Content and Television Advertising Avoidance,” by Kenneth C. Wilbur. This article, which relies on actual television viewing behavior collected (anonymously) using set-top cable boxes, examines the factors that influences viewers’ decisions to switch the channel when a commercial appears. As the author notes, television-watching is largely a passive activity, whereas the decision to change channels during a commercial break requires action. The author’s data allows him to observe (i) whether a viewer changes channels during a particular commercial and, if so, (ii) how many seconds into the commercial this switch occurs. The author specifies a proportional hazards model that uses information regarding the identity and the content of an advertisement to explain consumer channel-switching behavior. The resulting coefficient estimates indicate the factors that make consumers more or less likely to stop viewing a given advertisement. Among the empirical findings, the author finds evidence that viewers of live sports programming and animated television programming are less likely to change channels in order to avoid commercials. Television viewers appear to be more hesitant to avoid movie advertisements, but advertisements for websites, auto insurance, and women’s clothing are frequently avoided. There also appears to be diminishing returns on television advertising as viewers are more likely to avoid advertisements that are frequently shown or repeated. The second article is “Do New Media Substitute for Old Media?: A Panel Analysis of Daily Media Use,” by Shinjae Jang and Minsoo Park. This article seeks to measure the degrees of substitutability and complementarity among a variety of different media. The author uses daily media diaries completed by several thousand Korean households between the years of 2010 and 2012. The structure of the diaries allows the author to construct individual-specific panel data regarding the daily consumption of various media. The panel nature of the data allows the author to employ panel econometric techniques that allow individual time-invariant characteristics to be controlled for. The ability to control for these individual characteristics may be quite important in answering the author’s primary research question. For example, does subscribing to a print newspaper and reading news online imply that both are complements? Perhaps but it may also be the case that both actions correspond to someone that is a “news junkie.” Panel econometric techniques allow the author to control for such factors in a way that cross-sectional data would not allow. The author finds strong substitutability among print, television, and computer news consumption. On the other hand, telephone and computer consumption tends to be more complementary. The degree of substitutability or complementarity grows when the author controls for factors such as ownership of various devices or subscriptions. The third article is “Does Media Coverage of a Celebrity Suicide Trigger Copycat Suicides?: Evidence from Korean Cases,” by Yun Jeong Choi and Hyungna Oh. In this policy-relevant article, the authors attempt to discern whether greater media coverage of celebrity suicides leads to increases in national suicide rates. The authors merge reported national suicide data for Korea from 1997 to JOURNAL OF MEDIA ECONOMICS 2016, VOL. 29, NO. 2, 49–50 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08997764.2016.1188637