Celebrating Excellence
Faculty Showcase
Our faculty are dedicated to producing impactful research that provides valuable insights into advertising and public relations. This showcase exemplifies how our faculty work to provide new insights and perspectives into important topics that affect their field and beyond.
Featured faculty research
Please note that some articles, books, and other published works may require a subscription. Students and UT employees interested in reading a published piece can seek access through the UT Libraries website, lib.utk.edu.
Professor Eric Haley, Associate Professor Matthew Pittman
Remembering the FCB Grid: Thinking, Feeling, and Involvement in the Age of Social Media
In this Journal of Advertising article, Haley and Pittman outline the Foote, Cone, and Belding (FCB)grid’s original propositions as a strategic tool and discuss some of ways it has been misinterpreted along the way.
Associate Professor Minjie Li
Through integrating the theories of exemplification, attribution, and dehumanization, Li’s study experimentally investigates how the power exemplification of members from marginalized social groups like the transgender community in the news narrative interacts with the cisgender heterosexual audience’s sex to redirect people’s intergroup attitudes, responsibility attribution for transgender social issues, dehumanization, and aggression towards transgender people.
The findings, published in the Journalism Practice journal, demonstrated that after exposure to the news content featuring a high-power transgender woman exemplar, cisgender heterosexual women respondents reported significantly higher levels of dehumanization in regard to transgender people’s human nature.
Tombras School faculty articles in The Conversation
Associate Professor Matthew Pittman
How does a person become famous when they’re just a kid?
5 Super Bowl commercials that deserve places in the advertising hall of shame
Social media drains our brains and impacts our decision making – podcast
Why Dunkin’ and Lego rebrands succeeded – but X missed the mark
Social media scatters your brain, and then you buy stuff you don’t need