[Air-L] CFP - CMC Journal Special Issue - Promotional industries and platformised logics in the digital age

[Luiz Peres-Neto]

   Comunicação Mídia e Consumo (CMC)

   [1]http://revistacmc.espm.br/index.php/revistacmc

   Call for Papers for Special Issue

   Promotional industries and platformised logics in the digital age


   This special issue of our Scopus-based journal CMC aims to bring
   together research and scholarship that explores interactions between
   the promotional industries, technologies, and the media.


   Guest editors:

   Clea Bourne, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

   Gisela G. S. Castro, Advanced School of Advertising and Marketing
   (ESPM), São Paulo, Brazil

   Luiz Peres-Neto, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain

   Sergio Amadeu da Silveira, Federal University of ABC, Brazil


   Digital platforms have emerged as a new means of production in the
   wider global economy by extracting, circulating and controlling vast
   amounts of data as an economic, social and political asset. The
   metaphorical term ‘platform’ describes an infrastructure that enables
   two or more groups to interact, combining big data, cloud and mobile
   telephony together as an increasingly competitive weapon.


   Platforms have transformed global promotional industries, which include
   advertising, branding, marketing, sponsorship and public relations.
   Moreover, the production logics of platformisation have given rise to
   new promotional occupations such as digital content marketing,
   ecommerce, programmatic advertising, social media management and user
   experience (UX) design, to name a few.


   While the impact of digital platformisation has been at the forefront
   of various interdisciplinary debates, there has to date been limited
   attempt to understand the collective impact of platformisation and
   algorithmic logics on the global promotional industries.


   More than quarter of a century ago, the Birmingham School gave us the
   Circuit of Culture as a way to think about production, consumption and
   representation in the cultural economy. The model helped in
   apprehending the promotional fields as representational activity,
   situated between production and consumption, and responsible for
   circulating products and services as well as ideas.


   As digital platforms speed up distribution processes, bringing
   producers and consumers together in increasingly ‘frictionless’ ways,
   the gaps between many forms of digital production and consumption are
   closing. In the platform economy, promotional outputs (e.g.
   advertisement, branded content or sponsored video) are no longer
   bounded by time, while the media through which promotional outputs
   circulate now operates more logistically and algorithmically than it
   does narratively or representationally, as digital content attracts and
   organises users, places and things across time and space.


   How then should we understand promotional activity in the digital age?
   We welcome contributions that consider any of the following questions:


    1. How should we understand digital platforms and their relationship
       with promotional industries, their workers, their inputs and
       outputs? Here we acknowledge that some platforms such as Amazon,
       Facebook and Google are themselves promotional entities, numbering
       among the largest advertising companies in the world.
    2. What are the implications of recent technological developments such
       as shoppable TV, preparations for Facebook’s metaverse, or the
       prospective demise of third party cookies?
    3. Who are the new promotional intermediaries? What is the future for
       traditional promotional roles? How are traditional promotional
       roles positioned against emerging specialisms such as data insight,
       content strategy, social media management or user experience
       design?
    4. To what extent do contemporary promotional devices, tools and
       outputs represent new approaches? Contributions might explore
       anything from conversion funnels to in-house technology stacks,
       from analytics to tracking tools, from mobile apps to promotional
       bots and virtual brand influencers.
    5. Are there local, regional alternatives to programmatic networks
       controlled by major platforms that belong to groups such as
       Alphabet or Meta? Does the current supremacy of Big Techs eliminate
       the value of national advertising markets and render them hostage
       to these North American technological giants?
    6. The platform economy is intertwined with massive extraction of
       data. Machine learning and deep learning technologies also depend
       on data storage. Theories such as spectacularization, control
       societies, surveillance capitalism or data driven economy attempt
       to cover the phenomena of conversion of life flows into data. What
       are the concepts and theories that allow us to better deepen our
       analyses of promotional industries and platformised logics in the
       digital age?
    7. Finally, how and where can we gauge the changes within promotional
       industries empirically and theoretically, especially when much of
       promotional activity is opaque or difficult to trace?


   In addition to the questions posed above, contributors might also
   consider the following topics for article development, including but
   not limited to:


    1. AR/VR interfaces
    2. Big vs small – campaigns, devices, markets,
    3. Circuits of algorithmic culture
    4. Disruption, distribution, disarticulation
    5. Ethical issues, marginalisation and social justice
    6. Human-machine communication
    7. New promotional intermediaries
    8. Promotional devices and tools
    9. Working conditions and labour in promotional industries.


   Timeline

   1 July 2022 – Closing date for submission of 800 word abstract (please
   use the website for submissions:
   http://revistacmc.espm.br/index.php/revistacmc)

   1 August 2022 – Invitation to submit full-length papers

   31 October 2022 – Deadline for submitting full-length papers
   (submissions to website -
   http://revistacmc.espm.br/index.php/revistacmc)

   15 January 2023 – Announcement of articles selected for publication

   30 April 2023 – Publication of Special Issue

References

   1. http://revistacmc.espm.br/index.php/revistacmc