Brand Machines, Sensory Media and Calculative Culture

215 Pages·2016·1.805 MB·English

by  Sven Brodmerkel, Nicholas Carah (auth.)

Brand Machines,
Sensory Media and
Calculative Culture
Sven Brodmerkel and
Nicholas Carah
Brand Machines, Sensory Media
and Calculative Culture
Sven   B rodmerkel • Nicholas   Carah
Brand Machines,
Sensory Media and
Calculative Culture
Sven   Brodmerkel Nicholas   Carah
Faculty of Society & Design School of Communication and Arts
Bond University University of Queensland
Robina, Queensland, Australia Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
ISBN 978-1-137-49655-3 ISBN 978-1-137-49656-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-49656-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016952146
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2 016
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To my parents, in gratitude. (SB)
To Nicola and Felix. (NC)
A
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Some of the material used in this book was published in part or in a d ifferent
form in Mobile Media and Communication and N ew Media and Society . We
wish to thank these journals for permission to use this work here. A portion
of the case study material on XXXX Gold was collected as part of a study
funded by the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education (FARE).
Many thanks to FARE for their support of the critical examination of media
technologies, which is an important part of the public debate about alco-
hol. Parts of the fi eldwork for this book, particularly travel and attendance
at industry conferences, was funded by our institutions, the University of
Queensland’s Early Career Researcher scheme in the case of Nicholas, and
Bond University’s Faculty Research Grants in the case of Sven.
Nicholas wishes to thank the University of Queensland’s Centre for
Critical Cultural Studies and its former colleagues for their support and
encouragement over the past years. I am grateful for the opportunity to
spend time there and give a public lecture in 2014. This proved instru-
mental in developing central ideas for the book. Amy Dobson, Zala Volcic,
Mark Andrejevic, Gay Hawkins, Fiona Nicoll, Tom O’Regan, Caroline
Wilson-Barnao, Natalie Collie, Mallory Peak, Daniel Angus, Pradip
Thomas, Eric Louw and Graeme Turner in particular have been wonder-
ful colleagues, interlocutors, collaborators and mentors throughout my
time at UQ. Thank you to Gavin Smith too for giving me the opportunity
to present this work in a lecture at the Australian National University and
Andy Bennett during a Symposium at Griffi th University. Much love to
Nicola and Felix who come along for the ride on these endeavours, how
wonderful our life together is.
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Sven is thankful for the encouragement he has received from his col-
leagues at Bond University’s Faculty of Society and Design. He particu-
larly appreciates the support from Dean Raoul Mortley, the intellectual
stimulation (and motivation for gym workouts) provided by Jeffrey Brand,
Susie Ting’s commitment (and patience with a sometimes slightly dis-
tracted colleague), Mike Grenby’s enthusiasm for all the things that make
life enjoyable (and his steady supply of culinary treats), and the lively dis-
cussions about advertising and media technologies he had with students
during courses and seminars. And, last but most certainly not least, a big
hug, kiss and thanks to Karin for her careful management of a sometimes
absent-minded and occasionally disgruntled writer, and for now almost 25
years of unwavering support.
I
NTRODUCTION
In the seventh and fi nal season of Mad Men , the critically acclaimed TV
series about the fi ctional advertising agency Sterling Cooper in the 1950s
and 1960s, change comes in an unexpected and massive form. The agency
acquires an IBM 360, a state-of-the-art mainframe computer the size of a
room. While the agency management enthusiastically welcome the com-
puter, the agency’s art directors and copywriters are less impressed. In a
tellingly symbolic move, the computer is installed in the lounge where
the creatives used to meet for brainstorming sessions. Michael Ginsberg,
one of the young copywriters, is particularly disturbed by the agency’s
new acquisition, fearing that this new technology is going to render the
agency’s creatives superfl uous.
The leitmotif of this particular episode is that of technology as a source
of symbolic, physical and psychological disruption in the advertising
industry. The arrival of the IBM 360 symbolically represents the schism
that has characterised the industry and its professional ideology since its
early days. While the computer embodies a scientifi c, data-driven approach
to promotional communication, advertising creatives are proponents of
an artistic conceptualisation of advertising, based not so much on hard
facts but on the their aesthetic sensibilities and tacit cultural knowledge.
Ironically, if creatives working in the late 1960s were worried about the
computerisation of their craft, their fears have proved to be mostly unwar-
ranted. At that point in time, after a decade of disruption and innovation,
the advertising industry was about to enter a period of relative stability
in terms of its formation, conceptual defi nition and practice. Nowadays,
however, such concerns are most defi nitely uppermost with current
ix
x INTRODUCTION
advertising practitioners. In an interview with the industry publication
Advertising Age , M ad Men director Matthew Weiner said that at the time
he conducted research for the premier season of the series (2007) ‘there
was almost this feeling, as I would write to people in the advertising busi-
ness, that this show was an elegy to the end of their science, the end of
their profession’ (Bruell 2015). ‘IBM never undermined the Mad Men of
the world. But Google and Facebook did’, writes the leading technology
magazine Wired (2014). It points out that ‘as advertising has shifted to
the internet, more and more of it is being managed not by the Ginsbergs
and the Don Drapers, but by techies—engineers, programmers, and oth-
ers who understand the world of social media sites, real-time ad exchanges,
online analytics, and ad targeting systems’. While algorithmic media plat-
forms such as Facebook and Google are the most prominent examples,
various additional audience tracking and targeting platforms are also part
of the digital media ecosystem. This ecosystem ushers in a computational
approach to advertising that carries the potential to render the artistic
skills and tacit knowledge of advertising creatives largely obsolete. These
platforms hold the promise of ‘waste free’ advertising—personalised pro-
motional messages delivered in real-time based on extensive behavioural
tracking, predictive analytics and machine learning. One example of this
approach are M&C Saatchi’s artifi cially intelligent posters. These digital
outdoor posters, which hit the streets of London in mid-2015, feature
cameras registering and measuring engagement levels of passers-by based
on their emotional signals. A ‘genetic algorithm’ then tests different cre-
ative executions (layout, copy text, image, type-font and so on) and either
reproduces or kills off ad executions, according to the nature of consumer
response. This represents, as the industry magazine C ampaign Brief
writes, ‘a Darwinian approach to advertising whereby only the strongest
creative executions survive’ (Campaign Brief 2015). Some of these ‘genes’
will ‘mutate at random, meaning that the next generation has to naturally
improve over time’. As David Cox, Chief Innovation Offi cer at M&C
Saatchi explains:
This innovation is breaking new ground in the industry because it’s the fi rst
time a poster has been let loose to entirely write itself, based on what works,
rather than just what a person thinks may work. (Campaign Brief 2015)
INTRODUCTION xi
Although he does not fail to add that he is ‘not suggesting a dimin-
ished role for creative’, this campaign is likely to get advertising creatives
worried.
But this is only one of multiple forces that are disrupting the formerly
settled advertising landscape. In addition to data-driven advertising, the
opportunities social media platforms afford audiences to participate and
co-create content is said to have turned formerly passive consumers into
active, empowered ‘prosumers’ (Zwick et al. 2008) who are no longer sus-
ceptible to traditional forms of advertising. Thus, the advertising industry
appears to be fi ghting a battle on two fronts, being simultaneously threat-
ened by the computational power of algorithmic media platforms and by a
participative and supposedly ‘unmanageable’ active audience.
Critical accounts over the past decade have begun theorizing adver-
tising and branding in the context of this interactive and computational
media system. These accounts tend to focus on either end of the spec-
trum. On the one side are approaches that understand and theorise
brands as lived cultural practices, representing open-ended social rela-
tions (Banet-Weiser 2012; Moor 2003; Lury 2009; Arvidsson 2005; Holt
2002). These accounts pay close attention to the ways brands turn the
creative capacities of audiences into a valuable resource for their own ends.
Participating audiences who share and co-create content enable brands to
embed themselves more deeply into the lived cultural practices of con-
sumers and their (online) network of friends. Contrary to earlier criti-
cal accounts working exclusively in the tradition of structuralist semiotics
and Marxist ideology critique (Barthes 1977; Williamson 1978; Wernick
1991; Goldman 1992), these approaches recognise that letting consumers
‘run free’ in their meaning making activities and appropriation of cultural
texts increases, rather than diminishes, brand value.
At the other end of the spectrum are accounts that critically analyse how
digital media platforms and brands utilise the data processing capacities of
this media system to collect consumer intelligence, segment audiences and
to target consumers with personalised promotional messages (Zwick and
Knott 2009; Turow 2012; Couldry and Turow 2014; Andrejevic 2013).
The increasingly algorithmic nature of today’s media system affords media
organisations the opportunity to qualify audiences in ever more specifi c
and fi ne-grained ways, and to select and deliver content based on these
qualifi cations. Since consumers are often unaware of the criteria that lead
to their being sorted into certain segments and being targeted with par-
ticular promotional messages (Couldry and Turow 2014; Cheney-Lippold