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"Money and tv destroyed this thing!": mediated youth, popular music and the brandscape -- Music as it should be: building brands and making music -- "I pushed my way to the front with every band I saw": the centrality of live music in a mediated brandscape -- We are not here to endorse products; we are just here to play music: musicians in the brandscape -- Enjoy responsibly!: young people and corporate citizens as brand co-creators -- Brand builders -- "I'm here to party": the future of mediated youth

This article examines how brands have iteratively experimented with mobile and social media. The activities of brands – including Coca-Cola, Virgin and Smirnoff – at music festivals in Australia since 2005 are used as an instructive case. The article demonstrates how these brands imagined social media, attempted to instruct consumers to use mobile devices, and used cultural events to stimulate image production tuned to the decision-making of social media algorithms. The article contributes to debate by articulating how brands are important actors in the development of algorithmic media infrastructure and devices. Accounts of algorithmic media need to examine how the analytic capacities of social and mobile media are interdependent with orchestrating the creative participation of users.

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.

AbstractBrands have become a ubiquitous feature of life in market‐based consumer societies. While marketers aim to establish brands as efficient devices for guiding purchase decisions, critical scholarship investigates how branding functions as a mode of exercising power by shaping consumers' identities and consumer culture more broadly. Beginning in the 1950s as a predominantly semiotic critique of advertising, critical research into branding has over the decades developed a more complex conceptualisation of brands and their interrelationship with "active" audiences and the cultural environment in which they operate. The first part of this essay summarises this conceptual evolution. It provides the necessary background for interrogating how brands engage with, shape, and capitalise on "algorithmic culture". Recent dramatic changes in the data‐processing power of the developing algorithmic, platform‐dominated media environment is significantly altering the way brands operate and capitalise on consumer participation and popular culture. The present moment is therefore a crucial one to survey and evaluate emerging critical perspectives on brands and branding. By engaging with the current scholarship on social media, algorithms, and platforms, the second part of this essay outlines a number of novel and distinctive critiques emerging from this literature, which can help inform further research.

Brands are a critical part of the ongoing experimentation that underpins the development of mobile social media platforms like Instagram. Instagram had no dedicated advertising or analytics tools until 2014 so, in the absence of such devices, brands have developed uses of the platform that engage with the productive ability of cultural intermediaries and consumers to create and circulate images of their bodies, everyday lives, and cultural practices. This article examines the Instagram activities of the global vodka brand Smirnoff and the fashion retailer General Pants. Each brand engages with cultural intermediaries and builds themed activations at cultural events to orchestrate the production of images. Following Wissinger's (2007a) study of fashion models, we conceptualize Instagram as an image machine that captures and calibrates attention. Instagram expands the terrain upon which brands operate by dispersing the work of creating and engaging with images into consumers' everyday lives. The efforts made by brands to experiment with mobile media demonstrate the need to critically examine how participatory, discursive, and algorithmic modes of control are interrelated.

In September 2012, the Australian Advertising Standards Bureau (ASB) made 'landmark decisions' relating to the use of Facebook by vodka brand Smirnoff and beer brand Victoria Bitter. The ASB determined that (i) a brand's Facebook page is a marketing communication tool, and (ii) all contents on the page fall under the industry's self‐regulatory code of ethics, including consumer‐created content such as user‐generated comments and photos. The decisions come in response to a submission that the authors made regarding the Facebook pages of the two brands. These submissions were based on a research project that had monitored the use of Facebook by several Australian alcohol brands since the late 2010 to identify how these brands use social media as experiential social spaces to engage consumers in the co‐creation of content. This article reviews the ruling by analysing the advertisers' response to the complaint, the regulators' justifications for the decisions, and the possibilities and limitations of regulating social media in general. It argues that although the ASB has acknowledged that brands are responsible for all contents on their Facebook pages, the regulators' approach is of limited effectiveness given the way Facebook allows brands to embed themselves in the mediation of everyday life. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In September 2012, the Australian Advertising Standards Bureau (ASB) made 'landmark decisions' relating to the use of Facebook by vodka brand Smirnoff and beer brand Victoria Bitter. The ASB determined that (i) a brand's Facebook page is a marketing communication tool, and (ii) all contents on the page fall under the industry's self-regulatory code of ethics, including consumer-created content such as user-generated comments and photos. The decisions come in response to a submission that the authors made regarding the Facebook pages of the two brands. These submissions were based on a research project that had monitored the use of Facebook by several Australian alcohol brands since the late 2010 to identify how these brands use social media as experiential social spaces to engage consumers in the co-creation of content. This article reviews the ruling by analysing the advertisers' response to the complaint, the regulators' justifications for the decisions, and the possibilities and limitations of regulating social media in general. It argues that although the ASB has acknowledged that brands are responsible for all contents on their Facebook pages, the regulators' approach is of limited effectiveness given the way Facebook allows brands to embed themselves in the mediation of everyday life. [Copyright John Wiley and Sons, Ltd.]

This book explores emergent intimate practices in social media cultures. It examines new digital intimacies as they are constituted, lived, and commodified via social media platforms. The study of social media practices has come to offer unique insights into questions about what happens to power dynamics when intimate practices are made public, about intimacy as public and political, and as defined by cultural politics and pedagogies, institutions, technologies, and geographies. This book forges new pathways in the scholarship of digital cultures by fusing queer and feminist accounts of intimate publics with critical scholarship on digital identities and everyday social media practices. The collection brings together a diverse range of carefully selected, cutting-edge case studies and groundbreaking theoretical work on topics such as selfies, oversharing, hook-up apps, sexting, Gamergate, death and grief online, and transnational family life.--