What is unknown about commercial lobbying is far greater than what is known. These omissions distort our understanding of the extent and nature of business influence on politics. Especially when businesses engage in practices that harm health, it is crucial for public health advocates to understand corporate lobbying to counter its influence. Our study proceeded in three phases. First, based on an international audit, we developed a list of the categories of information about lobbying that could be disclosed under four groups (lobby firms, lobbyists, organizations and activities) and benchmarked Australian lobbyist registers against this list. Second, we manually extracted data from lobbyist registers in eight jurisdictions, cleaned the data and created a relational model for analysis. Finally, we classified a sample of organizations as public health organizations or harmful industries to compare their activities. We identified 61 possible categories of information about lobbying in international lobbyist registers. When applied to Australian lobbyist registers, Queensland covered the widest range of categories (13, 21%), though many lacked detail and completeness. Australian lobbyist registers provided data on 462 third-party lobby firms across Australia, currently employing 1036 lobbyists and representing 4101 organizations. Several of these represented harmful industries, with gambling interests hiring the most third-party lobby firms. Ultimately, Australian lobbyist registers do not provide enough information to understand the full extent of lobbying activities taking place. Political transparency is important for public health actors to be able to monitor corporate political activity and to protect policy-making from vested interests.
Often marketers face the challenge of how to communicate best with the customers who have the right responsibilities, influence or purchasing power, especially in business-to-business (B2B) settings. For example, B2B marketers selling software and IT need to identify IT decision-makers (ITDMs) within organizations. The modern digital environment in theory allows marketers to target individuals in organizations through specifically designed third-party audience segments based on deterministic prospect lists or probabilistic inference. However, in this paper we show that in our context, such ‘off-the-shelf’ segments perform no better at reaching the right person than random prospecting. We present evidence that even deterministic attribute information is flawed for ITDM identification, and that the poor campaign results can be partly linked to incorrect assignment of established prospect profiles to online identifiers. We then use access to our publisher network data to investigate what would happen if the advertiser had used first-party data that are less susceptible to the identified issues. We demonstrate that first-party demographics or contextual information allows advertisers and publishers to outperform both third-party ITDM audience segments and random prospecting. Our findings have implications for understanding the shift in digital advertising away from third-party cookie tracking, and how to execute digital marketing in the context of broad privacy regulation.
more » « less- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10470542
- Publisher / Repository:
- Springer Science + Business Media
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Quantitative Marketing and Economics
- Volume:
- 21
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 1570-7156
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 519-571
- Size(s):
- p. 519-571
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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