Portfolio #6: Promotional Culture & Digital Media
In Sarah Banet-Weiser’s ‘Branding The Authentic,’ she talks about how the idea of branding has become more prominent in our everyday lives, even the parts of it that people think of as authentic. She also discusses the history of branding and how it started off as a way to differentiate yourself by creating a brand name. After becoming more normalized and competitive, branding started to incorporate cultural values. Immaterial things such as feelings and experiences started being commodified along with actual products. Branding has also changed through social marketing, where consumers become more involved in the building of brands. Marketing strategies have grown to appear more authentic and less like traditional commercials. Banet-Weiser argues that authenticity has become integrated in branding culture.
Jarry Lee’s article, ‘What Does It Cost To Be Big On Instagram?’ gave a lot of insight into how much work goes into working as an influencer on Instagram. Being an influencer is often labelled as “easy” and there are some people who do not even consider it an actual job, but this article shed light on how it requires more time and effort than most people think. I definitely underestimated how much time it takes to grow a large following and be able to make a living off of being an influencer. I learned from the article that it usually takes a few years for influencers to earn a decent amount of money, much less being able to cover their living expenses. People often forget that especially for influencers who do not have people working for them, they also have to plan, edit, and take care of the business side of things.
Sometimes it is astounding to see how much some influencers are paid just to post a picture promoting something, but the documentary ‘FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened’ shows how much power influencers can have on their audiences. Their choice to pay famous models and influencers to post about Fyre Festival on their Instagrams made them very successful in getting people to want to attend. I was familiar with the basics of what happened at Fyre Festival before watching the documentary, but I did not know the full extent of the damage caused by this event. The festival had a huge impact on the people that lived on the island, and the workers on the island that helped build everything for the event did not get paid. After all of the damage was done, no one from Fyre seemed willing to help or even listen to them, which was really upsetting to see. Watching the documentary also changed the way that I thought of influencers and sponsored content. I had always thought that well-known influencers, such as the ones in the promotional video, were careful and knowledgeable about who they wanted to work with. As the story unfolded, I learned that these influencers were still willing to promote the festival without knowing much about it. This made me feel less willing to trust influencers in what they promote, because their participation in the sponsorship may be strongly influenced by their monetary gain. The documentary shed a lot of light on how promotional culture in digital media can be deceiving and the unreliability that can come with influencers.
