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"The world's most hostile environment": how the tobacco industry circumvented Singapore's advertising ban

Assunta M, Chapman S

Tob Control, 2004 Dec;13 Suppl 2:ii51-7.
PMID: 15564221

To review how tobacco transnational companies conducted their business in the hostile environment of Singapore, attempting to counter some of the government's tobacco control measures; to compare the Malaysian and the Singaporean governments' stance on tobacco control and the direct bearing of this on the way the tobacco companies conduct their business.

Matched MeSH terms: Advertising as Topic/legislation & jurisprudence*
Fulltext A mire of highly subjective and ineffective voluntary guidelines: tobacco industry efforts to thwart tobacco control in Malaysia

Assunta M, Chapman S

Tob Control, 2004 Dec;13 Suppl 2:ii43-50.
PMID: 15564220 DOI: 10.1136/tc.2004.008094

OBJECTIVE: To describe tobacco industry efforts in Malaysia to thwart government efforts to regulate tobacco promotion and health warnings.
METHODS: Systematic keyword and opportunistic website searches of formerly private tobacco industry internal documents made available through the Master Settlement Agreement and secondary websites; relevant information from news articles and financial reports.
RESULTS: Commencing in the 1970s, the industry began to systematically thwart government tobacco control. Guidelines were successfully promoted in the place of legislation for over two decades. Even when the government succeeded in implementing regulations such as health warnings and advertising bans they were compromised and acted effectively to retard further progress for years to come.
CONCLUSION: Counter-measures to delay or thwart government efforts to regulate tobacco were initiated by the industry. Though not unique to Malaysia, the main difference lies in the degree to which strategies were used to successfully counter stringent tobacco control measures between 1970 and 1995.

Matched MeSH terms: Advertising as Topic/legislation & jurisprudence
Fulltext A study of marketing and its effect on infant feeding practices

Suleiman A

Med J Malaysia, 2001 Sep;56(3):319-23.
PMID: 11732077

A baby milk market was created in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and was conceived through the mutual attraction of the manufacturers and doctors. This has partly attributed to the change from breast to artificial feeding. This study was conducted to determine whether marketing had any effect on infant feeding practices. Fifty Malay mothers whose last child was aged less than five years were asked, by questionnaire and by interview, to identify whether several marketing methods influenced their decision on the selection of infant feeding practice. It was found that these mothers felt milk advertisements on television were attractive (72%), were influenced by others to buy a particular brand of formula (38.4%), were influenced by free milk samples to buy a particular brand of milk formula (65.2%) and were not influenced by their doctors on the chosen method of feeding (68%). More studies should be conducted on a bigger sample in other settings and targeting other methods of marketing to substantiate the above results. Further, similar studies among Chinese and Indian mothers are also required.

Matched MeSH terms: Advertising as Topic*
Fulltext A systematic literature review: Real-time 3D reconstruction method for telepresence system

Fadzli FE, Ismail AW, Abd Karim Ishigaki S

PLoS One, 2023;18(11):e0287155.
PMID: 37967080 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0287155

Real-time three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction of real-world environments has many significant applications in various fields, including telepresence technology. When depth sensors, such as those from Microsoft's Kinect series, are introduced simultaneously and become widely available, a new generation of telepresence systems can be developed by combining a real-time 3D reconstruction method with these new technologies. This combination enables users to engage with a remote person while remaining in their local area, as well as control remote devices while viewing their 3D virtual representation. There are numerous applications in which having a telepresence experience could be beneficial, including remote collaboration and entertainment, as well as education, advertising, and rehabilitation. The purpose of this systematic literature review is to analyze the recent advances in 3D reconstruction methods for telepresence systems and the significant related work in this field. Next, we determine the input data and the technological device employed to acquire the input data, which will be utilized in the 3D reconstruction process. The methods of 3D reconstruction implemented in the telepresence system as well as the evaluation of the system, have been extracted and assessed from the included studies. Through the analysis and summarization of many dimensions, we discussed the input data used for the 3D reconstruction method, the real-time 3D reconstruction methods implemented in the telepresence system, and how to evaluate the system. We conclude that real-time 3D reconstruction methods for telepresence systems have progressively improved over the years in conjunction with the advancement of machines and devices such as Red Green Blue-Depth (RGB-D) cameras and Graphics Processing Unit (GPU).

Matched MeSH terms: Advertising as Topic
Fulltext Attitudes towards smoking and tobacco control among pre-clinical medical students in Malaysia

Tee GH, Hairi NN, Hairi F

Int J Tuberc Lung Dis, 2012 Aug;16(8):1126-8.
PMID: 22668450 DOI: 10.5588/ijtld.11.0254

Physicians should play a leading role in combatting smoking; information on attitudes of future physicians towards tobacco control measures in a middle-income developing country is limited. Of 310 future physicians surveyed in a medical school in Malaysia, 50% disagreed that it was a doctor's duty to advise smokers to stop smoking; 76.8% agreed that physicians should not smoke before advising others not to smoke; and 75% agreed to the ideas of restricting the sale of cigarettes to minors, making all public places smoke-free and banning advertising of tobacco-related merchandise. Future physicians had positive attitudes towards tobacco regulations but had not grasped their responsibilities in tobacco control measures.

Matched MeSH terms: Advertising as Topic
BAT flouts tobacco-free World Cup policy

Assunta M

Tob Control, 2002 Sep;11(3):277-8.
PMID: 12198283

In Malaysia, British American Tobacco flouted the World Cup of football's no-tobacco ruling

Matched MeSH terms: Advertising as Topic*
Fulltext Beauty Or Health? A Personal View

Riji HM

Malays Fam Physician, 2006;1(1):42-4.
PMID: 26998213 MyJurnal

This paper deals with the question of beauty and health in women. It discusses changing definitions of beauty as a result of influences from the entertainment, beauty and health product industries. Advertisements are seen to be major players in defining beauty through promotion of cosmetic, skin, hair and slimming products. Concerns relating to beauty become inculcated in girls through the process of socialisation as they mature into womanhood. The media plays a significant role in portraying the meaning of beauty through its representation of women. These influences largely influence and alter women's perceptions of their body image and in trying to meet the goals of beauty as represented by the media. This may result in dissatisfaction with their body image. Advertisements can encourage women to indulge in smoking as a fashionable trend or opt for plastic surgery in attempts to acquire beauty. This paper concludes with implications of the issues relating to changing perceptions of beauty and suggests recommendations.

Matched MeSH terms: Advertising as Topic
Bottle feeding and ideology in colonial Malaya: the production of change

Manderson L

Int J Health Serv, 1982;12(4):597-616.
PMID: 6754637 DOI: 10.2190/0A5U-GCC6-V4BU-28T5

Considerable attention has been paid to the correlation between high infant morbidity and mortality rates and the increased incidence of bottle feeding. The shift from prolonged breast feeding to a mixed regime or the exclusive use of sweetened condensed milk or infant formula has been related to the promotional activities of milk companies, and typically has been presented as a relatively recent development in Third World countries. However, the marketing of tinned and powdered milk only partially explains the increased use of these products. In colonial Malaya, condensed milk was marketed from the late 19th century. Infant formula was available from the turn of the century and was widely advertised, first in the English-language press and later also in the vernacular presses. At the same time, other social and cultural factors served to discourage breast feeding. There were changes in ideas regarding ideal body weight for both women and infants, and regarding infant care and diet; these ideas were presented in the mass media. In addition, maternal and child health clinics, established in the 1920s to reduce the high infant mortality rate, both propagated popular beliefs about infant weight and supplied milk and educated women to artificially feed their infants. Industry, the media, and health services all promoted, if not always intentionally, bottle feeding rather than breast feeding. Bottle feeding as an ideal, if not a reality, was thus well established before the intensive promotion of milk products by multinational corporations that followed the political independence of the colony.

Matched MeSH terms: Advertising as Topic/history
Fulltext Breast-feeding in Sarawak

Koh TH

Br Med J, 1980 Jan 12;280(6207):95-6.
PMID: 7353137
Matched MeSH terms: Advertising as Topic
Children's exposure to food advertising on free-to-air television: an Asia-Pacific perspective

Kelly B, Hebden L, King L, Xiao Y, Yu Y, He G, et al.

Health Promot Int, 2016 Mar;31(1):144-52.
PMID: 24997194 DOI: 10.1093/heapro/dau055

There is an established link between food promotions and children's food purchase and consumption. Children in developing countries may be more vulnerable to food promotions given the relative novelty of advertising in these markets. This study aimed to determine the scope of television food advertising to children across the Asia-Pacific to inform policies to restrict this marketing. Six sites were sampled, including from China, Indonesia, Malaysia and South Korea. At each site, 192 h of television were recorded (4 days, 16 h/day, three channels) from May to October 2012. Advertised foods were categorized as core/healthy, non-core/unhealthy or miscellaneous, and by product type. Twenty-seven percent of advertisements were for food/beverages, and the most frequently advertised product was sugar-sweetened drinks. Rates of non-core food advertising were highest during viewing times most popular with children, when between 3 (South Korea) and 15 (Indonesia) non-core food advertisements were broadcast each hour. Children in the Asia-Pacific are exposed to high volumes of unhealthy food/beverage television advertising. Different policy arrangements for food advertising are likely to contribute to regional variations in advertising patterns. Cities with the lowest advertising rates can be identified as exemplars of good policy practice.

Matched MeSH terms: Advertising as Topic
Communication and implementation of change in crop protection

Escalada MM, Heong KL

Ciba Found. Symp., 1993;177:191-202; discussion 202-7.
PMID: 8149821

The slow adoption of integrated pest management (IPM) has been attributed to the widespread gaps in farmers' knowledge of rational pest management. Other factors such as farmers' perception of high input use and promotion of pesticides also influence decisions to practise rational pest management. To bridge these gaps and improve farmers' pest management practices, most IPM implementation programmes rely on communication strategies. These communication approaches utilize either mass media or interpersonal channels or a combination. The choice of which communication approach to employ depends on project objectives and resources. Among extension and communication approaches used in crop protection, strategic extension campaigns, farmer field schools and farmer participatory research stand out in their ability to bring about significant changes in farmers' pest management practices. While extension campaigns have greater reach, farmer participation and experiential learning achieve more impact because learning effects are sustained. Communication media are important in raising awareness and creating a demand for IPM information but interpersonal channels and group methods such as the farmer field school and farmer participatory research are essential to accomplish the tasks of discovery and experiential learning of IPM skills.

Matched MeSH terms: Advertising as Topic
Consensus statement: appropriate consumer education and communication programs for weight- loss agents in Asia

Chan SP, Chui WC, Lo KW, Huang KC, Leyesa ND, Lin WY, et al.

Asia Pac J Public Health, 2012 Jul;24(4):641-9.
PMID: 21490107 DOI: 10.1177/1010539511402189

The increasing prevalence of overweight and obesity worldwide demands increased efforts in the prevention and management of obesity. This article aims to present consensus statements promoting appropriate consumer education and communication programs for weight-loss agents in Asia.

Matched MeSH terms: Advertising as Topic/standards
Fulltext Contemporary Approaches for Monitoring Food Marketing to Children to Progress Policy Actions

Kelly B, Backholer K, Boyland E, Kent MP, Bragg MA, Karupaiah T, et al.

Curr Nutr Rep, 2023 Mar;12(1):14-25.
PMID: 36746878 DOI: 10.1007/s13668-023-00450-7

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: Protecting children from unhealthful food marketing is a global priority policy for improving population diets. Monitoring the nature and extent of children's exposure to this marketing is critical in policy development and implementation. This review summarises contemporary approaches to monitor the nature and extent of food marketing to support policy reform.
RECENT FINDINGS: Monitoring approaches vary depending on the stage of progress of related policy implementation, with resource implications and opportunity costs. Considerations include priority media/settings. marketing techniques assessed, approach to classifying foods, study design and if exposure assessments are based on media content analyses or are estimated or observed based on children's media use. Current evidence is largely limited to high-income countries and focuses on content analyses of TV advertising. Ongoing efforts are needed to support monitoring in low-resource settings and to progress monitoring to better capture children's actual exposures across media and settings.

Matched MeSH terms: Advertising as Topic
Fulltext Content Analysis of Food and Beverages Advertisements Targeting Children and Adults on Television in Sri Lanka

Prathapan S, Wijewardena K, Low WY

Asia Pac J Public Health, 2016 Jan;28(1 Suppl):86S-92S.
PMID: 26658325 DOI: 10.1177/1010539515620481

Food marketing is one of the main factors in the increase in childhood obesity. The objective is to compare the strategies used for promotion of food and beverages advertisements on Sri Lankan television for children and adults.

Matched MeSH terms: Advertising as Topic/methods; Advertising as Topic/statistics & numerical data*
Fulltext Detecting opinion spams through supervised boosting approach

Hazim M, Anuar NB, Ab Razak MF, Abdullah NA

PLoS One, 2018;13(6):e0198884.
PMID: 29889897 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0198884

Product reviews are the individual's opinions, judgement or belief about a certain product or service provided by certain companies. Such reviews serve as guides for these companies to plan and monitor their business ventures in terms of increasing productivity or enhancing their product/service qualities. Product reviews can also increase business profits by convincing future customers about the products which they have interest in. In the mobile application marketplace such as Google Playstore, reviews and star ratings are used as indicators of the application quality. However, among all these reviews, hereby also known as opinions, spams also exist, to disrupt the online business balance. Previous studies used the time series and neural network approach (which require a lot of computational power) to detect these opinion spams. However, the detection performance can be restricted in terms of accuracy because the approach focusses on basic, discrete and document level features only thereby, projecting little statistical relationships. Aiming to improve the detection of opinion spams in mobile application marketplace, this study proposes using statistical based features that are modelled through the supervised boosting approach such as the Extreme Gradient Boost (XGBoost) and the Generalized Boosted Regression Model (GBM) to evaluate two multilingual datasets (i.e. English and Malay language). From the evaluation done, it was found that the XGBoost is most suitable for detecting opinion spams in the English dataset while the GBM Gaussian is most suitable for the Malay dataset. The comparative analysis also indicates that the implementation of the proposed statistical based features had achieved a detection accuracy rate of 87.43 per cent on the English dataset and 86.13 per cent on the Malay dataset.

Matched MeSH terms: Advertising as Topic
Discussion on prostitution in Singapore

Journal of the Malaya Branch of the British Medical Association, 1941;5:64-9.

Matched MeSH terms: Advertising as Topic
Fulltext Empowering precise advertising with Fed-GANCC: A novel federated learning approach leveraging Generative Adversarial Networks and group clustering

Su C, Wei J, Lei Y, Xuan H, Li J

PLoS One, 2024;19(4):e0298261.
PMID: 38598458 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0298261

In the realm of targeted advertising, the demand for precision is paramount, and the traditional centralized machine learning paradigm fails to address this necessity effectively. Two critical challenges persist in the current advertising ecosystem: the data privacy concerns leading to isolated data islands and the complexity in handling non-Independent and Identically Distributed (non-IID) data and concept drift due to the specificity and diversity in user behavior data. Current federated learning frameworks struggle to overcome these hurdles satisfactorily. This paper introduces Fed-GANCC, an innovative federated learning framework that synergizes Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Group Clustering. The framework incorporates a user data augmentation algorithm predicated on adversarial generative networks to enrich user behavior data, curtail the impact of non-uniform data distribution, and enhance the applicability of the global machine learning model. Unlike traditional approaches, our framework offers user data augmentation algorithms based on adversarial generative networks, which not only enriches user behavior data but also reduces the challenges posed by non-uniform data distribution, thereby enhancing the applicability of the global machine learning (ML) model. The effectiveness of Fed-GANCC is distinctly showcased through experimental results, outperforming contemporary methods like FED-AVG and FED-SGD in terms of accuracy, loss value, and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) indicators within the same computing time. Experimental results vindicate the effectiveness of Fed-GANCC, revealing substantial enhancements in accuracy, loss value, and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) metrics compared to FED-AVG and FED-SGD given the same computational time. These outcomes underline Fed-GANCC's exceptional prowess in mitigating issues such as isolated data islands, non-IID data, and concept drift. With its novel approach to addressing the prevailing challenges in targeted advertising such as isolated data islands, non-IID data, and concept drift, the Fed-GANCC framework stands as a benchmark, paving the way for future advancements in federated learning solutions tailored for the advertising domain. The Fed-GANCC framework promises to offer pivotal insights for the future development of efficient and advanced federated learning solutions for targeted advertising.

Matched MeSH terms: Advertising as Topic*
Ethical boundaries between the medical profession and the health care industry (1)

Ravindran J

Med J Malaysia, 2000 Aug;55 Suppl B:43-50.
PMID: 11125521
Matched MeSH terms: Advertising as Topic
Fulltext Exploring why girls smoke in Malaysia--a qualitative approach

Al-Sadat N, Binns CW

Asia Pac J Public Health, 2008 Oct;20 Suppl:6-14.
PMID: 19533855

The fast increase in the rate of uptake of smoking amongst adolescent girls in Malaysia is a public health concern. The objective of this study was to investigate factors that influenced the initiation of smoking and the effects of advertisement on consolidating the smoking habit among teenage girls in the urban city of Kuala Lumpur. Qualitative research was conducted using both interviews and focus group discussions with groups of adolescent girls. Data collected was analysed using grounded thematic theory methodology and validated using methodological triangulation. The reasons for initiating smoking elicited from the study can be grouped into 4 general themes; influence by peers, influence of seeing parents smoking, misguided belief that it could alleviate stress and finally that it would impress others. Smoking imageries in media and advertisements were not primary influencing factors in the initiation of smoking but it encouraged them to progress to become regulars. Ways should be sought to empower girls to feel more confident about resisting pressures to initiate smoking. This could be done through activities such as positive peer sports, education on how to alleviate stress and curbing of smoking imageries in the media.

Matched MeSH terms: Advertising as Topic
Fulltext Global benchmarking of children's exposure to television advertising of unhealthy foods and beverages across 22 countries

Kelly B, Vandevijvere S, Ng S, Adams J, Allemandi L, Bahena-Espina L, et al.

Obes Rev, 2019 Nov;20 Suppl 2(Suppl 2):116-128.
PMID: 30977265 DOI: 10.1111/obr.12840

Restricting children's exposures to marketing of unhealthy foods and beverages is a global obesity prevention priority. Monitoring marketing exposures supports informed policymaking. This study presents a global overview of children's television advertising exposure to healthy and unhealthy products. Twenty-two countries contributed data, captured between 2008 and 2017. Advertisements were coded for the nature of foods and beverages, using the 2015 World Health Organization (WHO) Europe Nutrient Profile Model (should be permitted/not-permitted to be advertised). Peak viewing times were defined as the top five hour timeslots for children. On average, there were four times more advertisements for foods/beverages that should not be permitted than for permitted foods/beverages. The frequency of food/beverages advertisements that should not be permitted per hour was higher during peak viewing times compared with other times (P

Matched MeSH terms: Advertising as Topic/statistics & numerical data*

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