Loyola students were busy at Media Day and among the crowd filming at the 2013 Chicago Auto Show for their first Multimedia Commercial Production class assignment. The task: Produce a video to be shared with others to get them interested in attending the Chicago Auto Show, America’s largest such event of its kind. Each highlighted the international event with stories of love, home, kids and humor.
Everyday women pursue the elusive concept of beauty. Advertisements provide a lens for viewing culture, highlighting priorities and ideals, including those relating to beauty. In my recently published article in the Online Journal of Communication and Media Technologies, we compare beauty in French and American advertisements. See
http://www.ojcmt.net/articles/31/313.pdf
It seems wherever you travel today Starbucks is there – Shanghai, Seoul, Tokyo, even Macau – just a few examples from my recent Asian trip. The coffee culture has become quite fashionable with the locals. As one young Korean auto manufacturer executive told me, “I go to Starbucks every morning. It makes me feel modern, Western, and liberal.” The chain’s popularity will slowly change culture. The power of marketing.
Commerc
ial messages are ubiquitous in
Asian major metropolitan areas.
Take for example these photos from Tokyo, Osaka, and Seoul. Chicago streets look naked in comparison – consider Water Tower Place – the view outside my office window. 
A proposal to allow Jumbotron-style signs on Michigan Avenue was introduced in the City Council (see Chicago Tribune article “Proposal could light up Boul Mich,” by C. Shropshire, July 10, 2012). Why not?
At ICA’s Intercultural Division session, Culture and Family, papers illustrated how culture is the backbone for how we define ourselves, act out, and communicate, including with our closest social groups – spouses, parents, and families. Such intimate communications can lead to life and death, as one paper showed in a case study of an honor killing. I was privileged to be a discussant at this session. See http://www.icahdq.org/
In my recent travel to Bulgaria and Turkey I got a glimpse of each nation’s advertising culture. Brand images come through loud and clear, regardless of language and writing, like in the Dunkin Donuts ad found in Sophia. English is employed to convey modern, western, and cosmopolitan, in ads for luxury products, like the perfume ad from Varna and a fashion ad from Istanbul.
Publishing House Grebennikov in Moscow translated and published my article, Culture and Metaphors across 5 Nations, in the Russian Advertising Theory and Practice Journal. Here’s the link: http://www.grebennikoff.ru/product/8/ (click «aIIIOAAEE OOAOAE»). Unfortunately, only the abstracts are posted on the journal’s website. You’ll have to get a printed copy for the entire article, see pages 102-123.
OWS protesters’ signs are examples of grass-roots forces attempting to generate cultural and political change. Using an advertising perspective and contextualizing messages in social and cultural terms, important issues raised by protesters can be identified. Results can enrich discourse of challenges. In this paper I content analyze 55 OWS signs 
to show how messages relate to persuasion and advertising strategies.
Team Teaching Advertising
Advertising is a rewarding career partly due to its complexity. Where else do creative, research, media, account management, strategists, producers, designers and others come together to develop innovative and relevant communication? As a professor of advertising I want to express this team work in the classroom. Team teaching is one effective approach. Please see the recent presentation I made to Loyola University Chicago’s 2013 Spring Focus on Teaching and Learning event.FOTL1_9_13