About

Laura F. Bright, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Media Analytics in the School of Advertising and Public Relations and the Director of the Nelson Center for Brand and Demand Analytics at the University of Texas at Austin in the Moody College of Communication. She teaches courses in media management, research methods, and social media effects. Dr. Bright's academic research focuses on social media effects, consumer behavior, digital wellbeing, and privacy. She brings over 20 years of professional experience in market research, interactive advertising, social media strategy, and client services to her academic work. Her research explores critical issues such as technology and user acceptance of big data and artificial intelligence among advertising and marketing practitioners, privacy concerns in digital public communications, and the psychological and social factors influencing consumer behavior in digital environments. Dr. Bright is actively engaged in curriculum development and research projects related to B2B and D2C analytics, and she frequently presents her work at international conferences and invited talks. Her teaching also includes innovative courses such as Script to Screen Commercials, which she co-teaches with industry professionals, providing students with practical insights into advertising campaigns and media production.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Advertising
• Psychology
• Computer Science
• Business
• World Wide Web
• Internet privacy
• Marketing

Selected publications

• Protecting Consumers, Empowering Brands: Privacy Remedies for Artificial Intelligence in Marketing

  2026-01-01

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Harnessing the power of joy: Exploring the role of discrete positive emotions in driving consumer behaviour and advertising engagement

  Journal of digital & social media marketing. · 2025-12-01

  article

  While existing advertising emotion research heavily emphasises negative emotions, positive emotions, like joy, remain less understood. This study examines the role of joy in shaping behavioural responses to advertising. We propose a framework to analyse the discrete emotion of joy and its relationship with consumer engagement. Using a sample of 3,407 Facebook advertisements from eight advertisers, we employed a text-analytic approach leveraging the NRC (National Research Council) Emotion Lexicon and natural language processing to measure sentiment and discrete emotions. Mediation analysis revealed that joy-related word associations fully mediated the effect of sentiment on advertising link clicks but did not mediate shares or comments. These findings suggest that linguistic markers of joy can effectively convey positive emotional framing in advertising, supporting short-term marketing objectives. This article is also included in The Business & Management Collection which can be accessed at http://hstalks/business.

  PublisherDOI

• Transformation of the Advertising Industry: Big Data and AI Make a Case for a Revised Advertising Curriculum

  Journal of Advertising Education · 2025-05-26 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  The inclusion of big data, that is the high volume, variety and velocity of data, along with artificial intelligence, or the ability to automate and target consumers in real time using big data has catalyzed a transformation in the advertising industry. This has warranted much needed revisions in college-level advertising education, however, there remains a gap in understanding knowledge requirements for new graduates from the perspective of advertising practitioners. This study explores the gap in coursework that advertising managers deem necessary for new graduates who are looking to start and build their careers in advertising and marketing. Using a qualitative approach, this research conducted an open-ended questionnaire survey of 100 industry practitioners with over 5 years of experience. The findings showcase a need for interdisciplinary curriculum that includes strategy, technology, and data management.

  PublisherDOI

• Developing a Health Campaign for Mental Health Awareness and Substance Use Prevention in Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic

  Substance Use &amp Addiction Journal · 2025-12-02 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  BACKGROUND: Designing effective health campaigns requires a thorough understanding of the intended audience. For stigmatized health issues like substance use disorder and mental health disorders, campaigns must be strategic, culturally competent, and evidence based. This manuscript details the process of creating a comprehensive statewide health campaign focused on mental health awareness and substance use prevention in Texas. METHODS: This study employs a multifaceted data collection approach. It includes a review of relevant health communication literature and an environmental scan to evaluate existing substance use and mental health campaigns. Two statewide online surveys were conducted with representative samples of Texans (N = 1028; N = 2033) to gauge views on substance use, mental health, risk perceptions, stigma, social connectedness, and prevention and treatment strategies. Additionally, 35 in-depth interviews were conducted with community leaders across Texas (eg, coalition managers, non-profit leaders, healthcare professionals), who then participated in 2 rounds of focus groups to provide feedback on research results. RESULTS: This paper demonstrates how a focus on evidence-based health communication can support a statewide public health campaign. Key insights from multiple rounds of formative research include, but are not limited to, the rise of substance use and mental health issues across Texas following COVID-19, the positive impact of social connection, and the need for substance use and mental health education. The interviews and focus groups with community leaders revealed valuable feedback on proposed campaign messages and their potential impact, leading to refinements based on their input. CONCLUSION: The findings outline a multi-step, multi-method approach centered on the key elements of health campaign design-an environmental scan, extensive literature reviews, 2 statewide surveys, and interviews and focus groups with community leaders. This process culminates in a creative brief and comprehensive campaign, providing a framework for future researchers to design evidence-based health campaigns.

  PublisherDOI

• “Failure to Notice or Noticing the Failure”

  Journal of Information Policy · 2025-07-01

  articleOpen access

  Abstract The current challenges of privacy self-management regulations and the inadequacy of notices pose challenges to protecting consumers’ privacy. This study introduces the concept of social contract literacy, blending social contract theory, privacy self-management, media literacy, and self-efficacy to understand consumers’ relationships with digital media and privacy. Using quantitative and qualitative research methods, this research develops a new scale measuring social contract literacy in the contexts of digital media and privacy. This approach bridges the gap between consumer literacy and legal obligations, offering guidelines for practitioners and policymakers to improve privacy protection measures and better understand consumer relationships with online companies.

  PublisherDOI

• Engaging the Arts for Library Employee Wellbeing

  North Carolina Libraries · 2025-04-21

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Creative arts activities in the workplace can improve many aspects of employee wellbeing. Benefits of employee arts engagement include reduced stress, mitigation of burnout symptoms, and promotion of positive social activities. This article explores findings from recent literature on the arts and employee wellness and provides insight on how to promote and plan arts activities for library staff. The article also includes tips for arts activity implementation and example projects that promote mindfulness and positive employee interactions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• How Does Fear Drive the News of the Day?

  2024-03-27

  book-chapter

  This chapter examines how “the world outside and the pictures in our heads” uniquely transfer in an online-only social media environment in relation to the discrete emotion of fear. Grounded in agenda-setting theory, bidirectional relationships of agenda-setting variables (i.e., news media coverage, public opinion, and topic salience) were measured in the daily temporal online discourse regarding Donald Trump’s transition of power in the White House. About 42,352,749 publicly available and English-language mentions occurred on Twitter, Reddit, forums, online news sites, blogs, or Tumblr. Time series analysis of the topic on Twitter revealed that the topic transferred from the public agenda to both the news media and the journalists. Notably, these journalists’ tweets were also driven by the discrete emotion of fear. In contrast to the agenda-setting theory’s original tenets, neither the journalist’s tweets nor the news media’s tweets set the public agenda.

  PublisherDOI

• Navigating a paradigm shift: Technology and user acceptance of big data and artificial intelligence among advertising and marketing practitioners

  Journal of Business Research · 2024-05-14 · 24 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Advertisement avoidance and algorithmic media: The role of social media fatigue, algorithmic literacy and privacy concerns

  Journal of digital & social media marketing. · 2024-12-01 · 7 citations

  articleSenior author

  This paper investigates the intricate dynamics of advertising avoidance within social media platforms, emphasising the roles of social media fatigue, privacy concerns and algorithmic media content awareness. With the pervasive influence of algorithms in curating user experiences, this research explores how these technological underpinnings, alongside users’ privacy apprehensions and the exhaustion from continuous media consumption, contribute to the growing tendency to bypass advertisements. Through a comprehensive review of literature and empirical analysis, the paper delineates the nuanced interplay between personalisation technologies and user engagement, offering insights into the psychological constructs that drive advertising avoidance behaviours. The findings underscore the need for a balanced approach in digital advertising, advocating for strategies that respect user privacy, mitigate social media fatigue and foster transparency in algorithmic content curation. This study not only broadens the academic discourse on digital advertising resistance but also provides practical implications for marketers aiming to navigate the complex landscape of consumer engagement in algorithm-driven media environments. The paper also addresses the challenge of balancing commercial interests with user satisfaction, encouraging innovative solutions for enhancing user engagement without compromising privacy or contributing to media fatigue. Through its comprehensive approach, the research provides valuable insights for academics and practitioners alike, suggesting future directions for developing more sustainable models of digital advertising that align with evolving user expectations and technological advancements.

  PublisherDOI

• Audience response to brand activism: An alignment evaluation framework

  Journal of brand strategy · 2024-06-01 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author

  Evolving from emerging expectations of brands to take action on societal issues, a comprehensive framework is introduced for advertising account planners to evaluate how well a brand’s activism initiative aligns with the cultural and social issues of its audience. Contextualised within brand activism alignment literature, the current research investigates audience responses to Bud Light’s partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. Using topic modelling, textual analysis and discussion, the proposed framework is evaluated for its ability to help guide advertisers while also mitigating risk in brand activism endeavours. The findings are discussed in relation to four potential scenarios that advertising strategists may use to navigate brand activism choices. Natural language processing methods are employed as a research strategy to shed light on the potential for a mismatch between Bud Light’s partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney and their audience. This paper describes how framework proposes research questions to understand the main message and benefit of a tactic to a brand’s target audience, as well as how the audience’s response may be seen online using the concept of affordances in social media.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Louiqa Raschid

  15 shared

• Kristen L. Sussman

  14 shared

• Gary B. Wilcox

  13 shared

• Matthew S. Eastin

  The University of Texas at Austin

  8 shared

• Kelty Logan

  University of Colorado Boulder

  8 shared

• Stacy Landreth Grau

  Texas Christian University

  7 shared

• Susan Bardi Kleiser

  6 shared

• Vladimir Zadorozhny

  University of Pittsburgh

  5 shared

Labs

• The LabPI

Awards & honors

• Aspiring Leaders Academy Inaugural Cohort Graduate, 2024
• Provost Faculty Fellows Mentoring Program Graduate, 2023
• Best Reviewer Award, Journal of Current Issues in Research a…
• Key Contributor in Media Analytics, Texas Health and Human S…
• Most Influential Articles, Journal of Current Issues in Rese…