This timely Research Handbook offers a wide-ranging examination of how the law responds to contemporary advertising and where it is still playing catch-up. Leading scholars assess advertising as a phenomenon that operates through systems that organise attention, bridging what ads say with how advertising influence is engineered.
The Research Handbook considers how branded content is governed in different jurisdictions, providing comparative and transferrable insights which demonstrate how familiar legal tools can be stretched when influence is built cumulatively through design, targeting and delivery. Contributors analyse the interplay between the rules aimed at limiting harm in high-risk or sensitive contexts, the intellectual property boundaries that advertising routinely presses against, and the platform- and data-driven machinery of contemporary promotion. While recognising that there is no single, all-purpose solution, they take a future-facing rather than futurist approach. Expert authors engage with contemporary advertising challenges such as the meta-verse and propose practical ways of thinking about reform.
Providing a map of current doctrine and emerging pressure points, this Research Handbook is an invaluable resource for advertising, consumer, and media law scholars and students. Advertising regulators, policy officials and practitioners in the field will also benefit from its practical insights.
