[Commlist] cfp: Promotional industries and platformised logics in the digital age

*Call for Papers – ‘Promotional industries and platformised logics in 
the digital age’*

*Special Issue of **/Comunicação Mídia e Consumo/*

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.

*Deadline for abstracts: 1 July 2022. Expected date of publication – 
April 2023.*

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:

·      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.

·      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?

·      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?

·      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.

·      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?

·      The platform economy is intertwined with massive extraction of 
data. Machine learning and deep learning technologies also depend on 
data storage. Theories such as spectacularisation, 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?

·      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:

·      AR/VR interfaces

·      Big vs small – campaigns, devices, markets,

·      Circuits of algorithmic culture

·      Disruption, distribution, disarticulation

·      Ethical issues, marginalisation and social justice

·      Human-machine communication

·      New promotional intermediaries

·      Promotional devices and tools

·      Working conditions and labour in promotional industries.

/Comunicação Mídia e Consumo /is an Open Access, Scopus-based journal, 
which aims to bring together research and scholarship exploring 
interactions between the promotional industries, technologies, and the 
media. *There is no article processing charge. Submissions in 
Portuguese, English and Spanish welcome.***

*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

For further information contact: Dr Clea Bourne, Dept of Media, 
Communications and Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London. 
(c.bourne /at/ gold.ac.uk) <mailto:(c.bourne /at/ gold.ac.uk)>. @bourne_clea.

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







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