Sven Brodmerkel

Brand machines, sensory media and calculative culture

This study argues that the defining feature of contemporary advertising is the interconnectedness between consumer participation and calculative media platforms. It critically investigates how audience participation unfolds in an algorithmic media infrastructure in which brands develop media devices to codify, process and modulate human capacities and actions. With the shift from a broadcast to an interactive media system, advertisers have reinvented themselves as the strategic interface between computational media systems and the lived experience and living bodies of consumers. Where once advertising relied predominantly on symbolic appeals to affect consumers, it now centres on the use of computational devices that codify, monitor, analyse and control their behaviours. Advertisers have worked to stimulate and harness consumer participation for several generations. Consumers undertook the productive work of making brands a part of their cultural identities and practices. With the emergence of a computational mode of advertising consumer participation extends beyond the expressive activity of creating and circulating meaning. It now involves making the lived experience and the living body available to the experimental capacities of media platforms and devices. In this mode of advertising brands become techno-cultural processes that integrate calculative and cultural functions. Brand Machines, Sensory Media and Calculative Culture conceptualises and theorises these significant changes in advertising. It takes consumer participation and its interconnectedness with calculative media platforms as the fundamental aspect of contemporary advertising and critically investigates how advertising, consumer participation and technology are interrelated in creating and facilitating lived experiences that create value for brands.

Instructions: Producing Participation

This chapter provides a detailed analysis of how the advertising industry conceptualises its own practice in the face of a media system that is increasingly characterised by the incorporation of audience participation into its mode of operation. The chapter features a rich account of the ways the participatory media environment has affected advertising practitioners’ notions of creativity and consumer agency. It then identifies and describes the key components of the participation paradigm, the term the authors use for describing the advertising industry’s new occupational ideology—the self-reflexive conceptualisation of what advertising is and how it is considered to work.

Interventions: Reimagining Advertising

This chapter examines the implications of participatory data-driven branding with regard to the possibilities of regulatory interventions and consumer resistance. The chapter argues that the current forms of advertising critique and regulatory oversight—which are predominantly based on the conceptualisation and evaluation of advertising as a form of textual representation—are inadequate for dealing with the way brands orchestrate consumer participation and utilise data for hyper-targeted promotional interventions. The authors illustrate this argument by analysing how alcohol brands activate consumers via experiential multimedia campaigns and elicit consumer engagement that produces brand value partly by prompting the circulation of content that is invisible to regulators and the public.

I/O Devices: Conducting Interactions

This chapter develops the argument that much of the contemporary advertising and branding strategies should be understood as a matter of eliciting attention, attraction and affect. It illustrates how advertisers create activations that create and utilise synergies between material devices and consumers’ real-world engagement in branded experiences of various kinds. The authors develop the concept of the affect switch to capture the way these devices help advertiser to conduct consumer interactions with the brand and to harness consumer engagement for further calculative modulation on data-driven social media platforms. The affect switch describes the interface between the living body and lived experience of consumers and the calculative capacities of media infrastructure.

Infrastructure: Orchestrating Action

This chapter continues to develop the concept of calculative participation by developing a detailed account of how the orchestration of consumer action generates value for brands. It advances the literature on branding, brand value creation and audience labour by illustrating how this emerging mode of branding makes the participating audience productive beyond just performing the ‘work of watching’ or making themselves available for surveillance (‘the work of being watched’). The authors introduce the notion of brand machines for capturing a new branding paradigm that rests on the simultaneous performance of cultural and computational work. Brands develop devices that prompt audiences to tune their experience, attention and bodies into the calculative capacities of media infrastructure.

Intrusions: Managing Disruption

This chapter analyses the interdependent relationship between the advertising industry and the developing participatory media system. Audiences are encouraged to actively participate in the development, mediation and distribution of content, while at the same time these activities are subject to surveillance and big data analysis. Advertisers have to adapt to the shifting economic logic of the ‘audience marketplace’ in this data-driven, participatory media environment dominated by algorithmic media platforms such as Facebook and Google. This chapter traces the advertising industry’s responses to the disruption of its established business model and the challenge of becoming disintermediated by the Silicon Valley media giants.

Impulses: Engineering Behaviour

This chapter analyses how advertisers construct a discursive image of the contemporary consumer that conforms to the central premises and ideological requirements of the participation paradigm described in Chapter 2. The chapter argues that the advertising industry uses central claims made by the neurosciences and behavioural economics regarding humans’ inherently cognitively flawed nature for simultaneously promoting advertising as a valuable ‘utility’ for consumers and for justifying attempts to engineer consumer behaviour by means of persuasive technologies and ‘nudging’ choice environments. This conceptualisation of the contemporary consumer paradoxically integrates notions of human irrationality and consumer empowerment in a way that it can serve as a moral justification for the utilisation of a wide range of technologies of social influence and control.