13 The Political Economy of Sponsored Content and Social Media Entertainment Production

To Eat the Cake and Have It, too: How Marketers Control Influencer Conduct within a Paradigm of Letting Go

“…Another path for deepening the analysis lies in looking beyond the influencer industry to add context. For instance, marketers have since long used testimonial advertising (Shtern & Hill, 2021) and thus look back at a history of working with (and controlling) celebrities, consumers “from next door,” and others. Since the emergence of the web 2.0 with its user-generated content, marketers have also faced the challenge of navigating an environment that is shaped by increasingly empowered consumers (Labrecque et al, 2013).…”

“…Moving up along the process model, marketers assume that sponsored influencer posts are only effective if the influencer is authentic (Borchers & Enke, 2021). In this, they follow the general discussion in the field that treats authenticity as a crucial component in successful influencer careers (e.g., Duffy & Hund, 2015;McRae, 2017;Shtern & Hill, 2021) and influencers as "experts in authenticity" (Arriagada, 2021, p. 233). Effects research supports the letting go logic in that it finds evidence for the importance of authenticity in influencer communication (Lee & Johnson, 2022;Pöyry et al, 2019).…”

Branded Dreams, Boss Babes: Influencer Retreats and the Cultural Logics of the Influencer Para-Industry

“…The rise of influencers, and their focus on brand sponsorship, has transformed apps like Instagram into platforms of “shoppability,” or sites at which social interaction occurs in an environment encoded with “marketplace logics, capacities, and proclivities,” embedded in both the “physical designs and cultural forms” available within the app (Hund & McGuigan, 2019, p. 20). At the same time that platforms increasingly rely on influencers to generate revenue through advertising (Shtern & Hill, 2021), influencers must continuously organize their cultural production around the infrastructures and algorithms of platforms and the demands of advertisers to remain visible and thus profitable (Bishop, 2018, 2019; Duffy et al, 2021; Poell et al, 2022). The result is a rapidly formalizing and professionalizing industrial space where influencers increasingly occupy niche commercial verticals like travel, fashion, beauty, wellness, lifestyle, sport, and video gaming that are attractive to brands (Bishop, 2018, 2021; Lobato, 2016).…”

“…This category of creative labor emerged against the backdrop of wider political and economic shifts—falling under the broad rubric of neoliberalism and global capitalism—that began in the 1970s and that have had a particularly destabilizing effect within the cultural industries, increasing employment precarity and requiring a high degree of flexibility from workers who take on risks and responsibilities that were once the responsibility of employers, such as training, healthcare, and a stable salary (Duffy, 2017; Hearn & Schoenhoff, 2015; Neff, 2012). Within this context, the emergence of platforms like YouTube in the early 2000s, followed by platforms like Instagram in the 2010s, contributed to an explosion of “do-it-yourself” (DIY) media production practices through low barriers to entry, and entrepreneurial individuals practicing “creative self-enterprise” (Duffy & Hund, 2015, p. 1) have capitalized on partnerships with brands seeking access to the niche audiences and communities influencers have fostered across platforms (Bishop, 2021; Cunningham & Craig, 2019; Duffy, 2017; Duffy et al, 2021; Shtern & Hill, 2021). The rise of influencers, and their focus on brand sponsorship, has transformed apps like Instagram into platforms of “shoppability,” or sites at which social interaction occurs in an environment encoded with “marketplace logics, capacities, and proclivities,” embedded in both the “physical designs and cultural forms” available within the app (Hund & McGuigan, 2019, p. 20).…”

The Neodiluvian Age

“…Artists-turned-digital-creators, attracted to content creation for this very autonomy, decry this sleight-of-hand as having "trained their creativity to suit an algorithm," bringing in more revenue for the platform and creator at the expense of their artistic and intellectual worth (Walker, 2022, 9:18). This cycle is only reinforced by the stratification of creators, the intimacy of their relationships to platforms, and their appeal to key advertising demographics, affecting by extension their ability to generate money (Shtern & Hill, 2021). In the face of rising production costs, content creators are faced with a diversity of individually insufficient revenue sources and minimal support from platforms.…”