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  • © 2016

Brand Machines, Sensory Media and Calculative Culture

Palgrave Macmillan
  • Offers original insights into the contemporary strategies and affects of creating brand impact
  • Timely account of how digitisation, by creating a new sensory as well as techno-cultural environment, is transforming the relationship between advertising media and consumers
  • Extremely original shift of focus away from the ostensible ideological effects of advertising and on to the experiential environment now created by digital marketing

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Table of contents (7 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xxi
  2. Intrusions: Managing Disruption

    • Sven Brodmerkel, Nicholas Carah
    Pages 1-33
  3. Instructions: Producing Participation

    • Sven Brodmerkel, Nicholas Carah
    Pages 35-66
  4. Impulses: Engineering Behaviour

    • Sven Brodmerkel, Nicholas Carah
    Pages 67-95
  5. I/O Devices: Conducting Interactions

    • Sven Brodmerkel, Nicholas Carah
    Pages 97-123
  6. Infrastructure: Orchestrating Action

    • Sven Brodmerkel, Nicholas Carah
    Pages 125-155
  7. Interventions: Reimagining Advertising

    • Sven Brodmerkel, Nicholas Carah
    Pages 157-187
  8. Conclusion

    • Sven Brodmerkel, Nicholas Carah
    Pages 189-194
  9. Back Matter

    Pages 195-201

About this book

This study argues that the defining feature of contemporary advertising is the interconnectedness between consumer participation and calculative media platforms. It critically investigates how audience participation unfolds in an algorithmic media infrastructure in which brands develop media devices to codify, process and modulate human capacities and actions.


With the shift from a broadcast to an interactive media system, advertisers have reinvented themselves as the strategic interface between computational media systems and the lived experience and living bodies of consumers. Where once advertising relied predominantly on symbolic appeals to affect consumers, it now centres on the use of computational devices that codify, monitor, analyse and control their behaviours. Advertisers have worked to stimulate and harness consumer participation for several generations. Consumers undertook the productive work of making brands a part of their cultural identities and practices. With the emergence of a computational mode of advertising consumer participation extends beyond the expressive activity of creating and circulating meaning. It now involves making the lived experience and the living body available to the experimental capacities of media platforms and devices. In this mode of advertising brands become techno-cultural processes that integrate calculative and cultural functions. Brand Machines, Sensory Media and Calculative Culture conceptualises and theorises these significant changes in advertising. It takes consumer participation and its interconnectedness with calculative media platforms as the fundamental aspect of contemporary advertising and critically investigates how advertising, consumer participation and technology are interrelated in creating and facilitating lived experiences that create value for brands.


Reviews

“The unique insights presented in BrandMachines are compelling (and sometimes disturbing) to any reader interested in the ever-pervasive nature of digital branding practices. Brodmerkal and Carah combine expertise in scholarly debates, case examples, first-hand material from visible practitioners and ethnographic observation without falling into the trap of techno-optimistic, nor techno-pessimistic perspectives on uses of social media.”  (Dr Jolynna Sinanan, School of Media and Communications and the Digital Ethnography Research Centre, RMIT University, Melbourne and co-author of “Webcam” and “How the World Changed Social Media”)

“A very original analysis of the relation between the commercialisation of digital technology and the lives of contemporary consumers: advertising in the age of the algorithm.” (John Sinclair, University of Melbourne, Australia)

Authors and Affiliations

  • Faculty of Society & Design, Bond University, Robina, Australia

    Sven Brodmerkel

  • School of Communication and Arts, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

    Nicholas Carah

About the authors

Dr Sven Brodmerkel is Assistant Professor for Advertising and Integrated Marketing Communications at Bond University, Australia and a Board Member of Miami Ad School (Sydney). Before his academic appointment, he worked for several years in the advertising industry. His research investigates the intersection between advertising, technology and popular culture. 


Dr Nicholas Carah is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of Queensland, Australia. His research examines media platforms and devices, branding and everyday life. He is the author of Pop Brands: branding, popular music and young people and Media and Society: production, content and participation.

Bibliographic Information

Buy it now

Buying options

eBook USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Hardcover Book USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access