Content Analysis For Financial Newspaper Advertising

After entering the World Trade Organization (WTO) at the end of 2001, Chinese government pays more attention to finance. The financial branding becomes more and more important. As a result, advertising plays a bigger role in financial branding. Based on this background, we decided to make a systemic quantitative research for financial newspaper advertising. We investigated all financial advertisements in China Business Paper and Yangcheng Evening Paper from 2000 to 2004 by content analysis with 25 encoding items. These items gave us the information about the space of whole paper, locations, pictures, colors, models, headlines, slogans, copy bodies of financial advertisements. According to the analysis of these items, we hope to gain some rules and characteristics about financial advertising. At the same time, we also gave some suggestions for the development of financial advertising.There are three key findings of the research as follows. Firstly, the absolute number of financial advertisements was small, but it increased year by year after 2002. Bank advertising and insurance advertising were the main force of financial advertising. Besides, foreign-invested financial institutions and Chinese joint stock financial institutions played a good performance. Secondly, as the advertising expression, the characteristics are small, less pictures, non-star models, black and white. We can find that financial advertising is weak in improving advertising attention value. Thirdly, there have different advertising strategies among different financial institutions. Foreign-invested financial institutions often choose image advertising with big paper space and colorful pictures to express their ideas. Chinese financial institutions use product advertising more often with small paper space and black and white advertisements.At last, we gave some suggestions for financial advertising and limitations of the research.