michaelprieler

assistant professor of communication studies

Currently, I am Assistant Professor at the School of Communications, Hallym University (South Korea). I am undertaking the research projects "Gender Representations in Philippine Television Advertisements", "Korean Television Advertising in an International Perspective: The Representation of Older People" as well as the project "Advertising to the Silver Market in Japan."

The latter project is undertaken in cooperation with Dr. Florian Kohlbacher (German Institute for Japanese Studies), Prof. Shigeru Hagiwara (Keio University) and Assoc. Prof. Akie Arima (Tokyo Woman's Christian University). Based on the current demographic shifts and the aging population in Japan, this so-called silver market becomes more and more important for advertising agencies. This project analyzes how far these developments can be seen in Japanese commercials (i.e., if there is increased/changed representation of elderly people) and in what ways elderly people are targeted in such advertisements. In order to better understand this phenomenon, three main research approaches are employed: (1) A comparative content analysis of 1500 TV commercials from 1997 and 2007, (2) A survey among consumers, and (3) A survey among advertising agencies. This project was awarded the Yoshida Hideo Memorial Foundation Research Grant by Dentsu.


 

Japanese Commercials

Before, my doctoral thesis on the topic "The Representation of 'the Foreign' in Japanese Television Commercials" at Tohoku University, in Japan, was based on a sample of 40,000 recorded TV commercials, analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. This analysis covered the wide-ranging area of "foreign elements" in Japanese commercials. This catch-all includes foreign people, places, languages, and music, and in my dissertation systematic investigation of these elements led to larger discussions of globalization, national identity, gender, ethnicity and racism. Its findings have applications for the areas of cultural communication, cultural and media studies, sociology, anthropology, cross-cultural comparison, and Japanese studies.