Myung-Il Choi

Promoting Organ Donation Through an Entertainment— Education TV Program in Korea: Open Your Eyes

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of the characteristics of the program, Open Your Eyes, an entertainment—education TV program in Korea, on parasocial interaction and behavioral intention for organ donation. The results indicated that affective evaluation positively affected parasocial interaction with the program but cognitive evaluation negatively affected involvement with beneficiaries in the program. Also, it was found that cognitive evaluation of Open Your Eyes had a significant positive effect on behavioral intention. In addition, a significant positive effect of program engagement on the behavioral intention was found. Thus, the results indicate that individuals who feel program engagement of Open Your Eyes will be more likely to proceed with organ donation. However, no direct effect of involvement with the beneficiary and program hosts was found.

The Pivotal Role of AJC in the Growth of Communication Research in Asia: A semantic network analysis

ABSTRACT This study explored how Asian communication scholarship has evolved by using semantic network analysis on keywords in titles of publications in Asian Journal of Communication (AJC) from 1990 to 2015. It also compared those results with the results of a similar analysis of Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly (JMCQ) to find both Western and unique aspects of AJC. AJC scholarship has shown its Asian uniqueness by exploring social and cultural comparisons focusing on a few East Asian countries. It has also followed Western communication scholarship by investigating effects of political communication and news media, as well as advertising using television in the United States, similar to JMCQ. AJC contributes to mainstream mass communication scholarship while keeping its own Asian perspectives.

Practitioners’ celebrity endorser selection criteria in South Korea: an empirical analysis using the Analytic Hierarchy Process

ABSTRACT This study investigated how clients and advertising agencies in Korea prioritized celebrity selection criteria differently. Responses from 50 client-side and 50 agency-side executives in Korea were analyzed using the Analytic Hierarchy Process. Results show that the brand-centered factor ‘Match-up’ was considered most important by both clients and agencies but that the celebrity-centered factor ‘Popularity’ was ranked quite differently (i.e. second by agencies and fourth by clients, out of five factors). Other factors (i.e. Availability and Potential Risk) were ranked similarly. The main finding of the study is that Korean ad agencies and clients placed different weight on celebrity endorser selection criteria. This finding is particularly valuable to national and international advertisers who are deliberating about celebrity endorsement for the Korean market.