The Election Campaigning workshop will draw from the experience of the U.S. presidential campaigns in 2004 and the parliamentary elections in Germany in 2005. We will discuss questions such as: What influence do TV debates have on the final outcome of an election? Which role do opinion polls play? Is it true that image supersedes content and issues in candidates’ efforts to win votes?

This workshop will take into account the criticism CEOs have been facing – and not just the former heads of Enron, Parmelat and AIG, but executives across the board. Going by recent media coverage, almost any corporate leader should be considered a potential fraud. What differences, if any, are emerging between the coverage of CEOs in trade publications and in mainstream media on the international level? How much of a company’s media coverage should be carried by its CEO? What else can be done to build public trust? In that context, we will also address executive compensation and companies’ communication on that subject.

The Corporate Communications workshop will focus on defining risk indicators for corporate communications. What are the value drivers that set a company apart and that should be communicated to foster consistent media coverage? How can other departments within a company become more active in supporting communications in its effort to push the coverage of a company’s value drivers above the awareness threshold?

This year’s workshop will consider how analysts quotations push the share price of a company as well as what impact the rest of a company’s media coverage has on investor sentiment, particularly in regard to its mid-term influence on the stock price. The workshop will also consider how the media can improve the information it publishes in reports on companies to aid analysts in their decision-making. Finally, we will consider how banks and research firms can better market their analysts’ findings to the media, rather than to wait for journalists to call on them.

The workshop on Country Images will be split in two parts: One section will discuss the latest findings regarding the changing images of the U.S. in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. The second section will focus on the image of Jordan in Europe and in the U.S. What both countries have in common is a lack of diversity in the thematic structure of their media coverage. Coverage of the U.S., though vast, is often reduced to Iraq and the Middle East, while Jordan receives little coverage and depends on special events, such as the World Economic Forum summit, for international attention. Both are thus subject to agenda setting and agenda cutting on the part of international media.

On the one hand, the NGO workshop will consider the difficulties of traditional NGOs like Amnesty International in maintaining their status in the media, with more and more recently founded NGOs promoting similar issues. On the other hand, the workshop will take the example of AIESEC to discuss what basic requirements need to be met for an NGO to become part of the agenda setting circle in the media.

This year’s workshop will continue to work on ways in which the business climate index and the consumer confidence index can be predicted with the help of media content analysis. Studies in Germany and the U.S. have shown that the media has a strong impact on both indicators, which we will try to break down further to the level of individual companies and industries. We will also consider the findings of a DIW-study on how financial news shape the public perception of inflation.

The media workshop will focus on the underlying value for a news outlet in getting quoted by other media in order to improve its credibility regarding specific issues. Research has shown that the most effective way to get access to exclusive interview partners is to earn a reputation in the community as the premier address for pushing particular news stories above the awareness threshold.

The workshop on agenda setting and TV news will consider ways of implementing quality checks to effectively improve the work at news desks in a real time to ensure that even under time pressure important aspects of news stories will not get lost, as has happened in the past. This will not only affect regional coverage but also business reporting.

The agenda setting workshop will present and discuss the latest findings of first and second level agenda setting theory and try to link them more strongly with the ICA=CH model. In the end, the concept of awareness thresholds needs to be understood as a systematic tool for academics as well as for communications executives trying to ensure that their messages have been received by their target audience.