PLAYING THE GAME: VIDEO GAMES AND VIDEO GAME STREAMING PLATFORMS AS MARKETING COMMUNICATION CHANNELS

While video games are generally viewed as a form of entertainment for a small subset of people, in reality they provide a channel for nearly 3.2 billion people to interact with others and offer multiple pathways for marketers to interact with consumers. Pair this alongside 140 million unique consumers who consumer nearly 24 billion hours of content on video game streaming platforms (VGSPs), such as Twitch, and there is a deep need for marketers to understand how to engage consumers in these environments. This dissertation provides a conceptualization of the video game ecosystem as well as the types of influencers on VGSPs, while highlighting important marketer-to-consumer interactions that occur through these platforms. In the first essay, I provide a new framework called the video game ecosystem to show how video games can be leveraged as a marketing communication channel and how it differs from other popular channels, such as social media and television. Furthermore, I identify 7 testable propositions from the marketer’s perspective I believe will meaningfully direct the current marketing practice while shaping marketing research’s future including outlining the ways marketers should build and present content through this channel, highlighting marketer-consumer interactions unique to this ecosystem, and showcasing the potential ways firms can leverage the video game ecosystem in their marketing strategies. Finally, in this essay I present 12 future research areas to help kickstart marketing research in this domain. In the second essay, I present a new conceptualization of influencer marketing through VGSPs. Specifically, I highlight how influencer-to-influencer (I2I), influencer-to-consumer (I2C), and consumer-to-consumer (C2C) relationships differ on VGSPs compared to traditional social media platforms, and how these relationships impact consumers downstream. I identify two unique types of influencers on VGSPs (video game streamers and esports athletes) and provide 6 novel propositions regarding the formation of social networks around these influencers. Finally, I provide 8 research areas to help shape the future of consumer research across multiple domains

Influencer management tools: algorithmic cultures, brand safety, and bias

This article explores algorithmic influencer management tools, designed to support marketers in selecting influencers for advertising campaigns, based on categorizations such as brand suitability, “brand friendliness,” and “brand risk.” I argue that, by approximating these values, tools reify existing social inequalities in influencer industries, particularly along the lines of sexuality, class, and race. They also deepen surveillance of influencer content by brand stakeholders, who are concerned that influencers will err and be “cancelled” (risking their investments in content). My critical framework synthesizes feminist critiques of ostensibly participatory influencer industries with close attention to critical algorithmic studies. This article provides an in-depth look at how brand risk and brand safety are predicted and measured using one tool, Peg. Through a “walk through” of this tool, underpinned by a wider industry ethnography, I demonstrate how value-laded algorithmic judgments map onto well-worn hierarchies of desirability and employability that originate from systemic bias along the lines of class, race, and gender

The impact of influencers on advertising and consumer protection in the Single Market

Influencer marketing as part of the advertising industry has grown significantly in recent years, becoming one of the most popular and effective forms of online advertising. The fast-growing market of influencers comes with potential risks for consumers and creates several challenges for regulators. This study provides information and analysis on the impact of influencers on advertising and consumer protection in the Internal Market, identifies best practices and makes recommendations for future action. This document was provided by the Policy Department for Economic, Scientific and Quality of Life Policies at the request of the committee on Internal Market and Consumer Protection (IMCO)

Social Media, Personality, and Leadership as Predictors of Job Performance

A thorough assessment of privacy concerns, reviewer bias, and applicant computer familiarity informs this longitudinal study incorporating features derived from social media, personality, leadership, traditional selection methodology, and objective measures of employee performance to build an empirical foundation for future research. To date, limited research has embarked upon an in-depth examination of the organizational implications of using social media data to assess job applicants. This dissertation addresses the question of whether social media data matters in the practical context of talent selection. I begin with a review of pertinent online communication theories, including media richness, cues filtered out, and social information processing theories before applying their concepts to social media. I review accumulated evidence that signals from social media use can predict personality and explore less-studied links between social media and full leadership behavior, with a focus on transformational leadership. The review also integrates privacy behavior. A survey covering personality, leadership, and privacy behavior, was completed by 107 call center agents who were subsequently invited to share their public Facebook profile. Of those, 48 volunteered to share quantitative and qualitative data from their public profile. A group of trained raters further coded profiles. The participants\u27 employer also provided performance and retention data. This study found mixed support for previously reported links between social media use and personality. An interaction of conscientiousness and computer skills predicted privacy skills and profile completeness, such that participants either high in both or low in both were more likely to have higher self-rated privacy skills and completed social media profiles. Raters were easily able to deduce demographic information from social media profiles, including gender, age, and ethnicity. Worryingly, evidence of bias in pass rates was detected based on raters\u27 hire vs no-hire recommendations, though the degree of bias varied by pass rate threshold. Finally, the various predictors were combined alongside scores from participants\u27 original pre-hire selection assessments to determine whether there was incremental value in including them as part of a holistic selection process. Some support was found for the incremental utility of the entire battery, as personality, social media activity, human ratings of social media profiles, and self-reported transformational leadership behavior uniquely contributed to a Cox regression model predicting retention. Support for the battery approach was much weaker when predicting efficiency (average handle time) as only transformational leadership provided statistically significant predictiveness beyond the pre-hire assessment. Altogether, this dissertation underscores the importance of relying on defensible selection methods to predict retention and performance outcomes. If social media is used in screening, it is best done in the context of other selection methods and should be based on computer-based automated screening rather than individual human ratings to reduce bias. This dissertation demonstrates that social media and leadership can add incremental prediction to selection decisions for entry-level jobs and makes recommendations for further research

Twitch Streamers and the Platformization of Cultural Production: Understanding Complementary Labor in the Creative Economy

Twitch and other social media platforms allow a handful of content creators to act as social media influencers who perform complementary labor that advances their careers while also creating monetary and social value for Twitch by managing relationships with their fans, the platforms, as well as commercial sponsors and advertisers. Streamers who are the best at catering to Twitch’s primary audience of young white males are more likely to be permitted frictionless entry into the advertising marketplace by the platform and by sponsors. Conversely, streamers with marginalized identities are frequently denied these same opportunities because they are often targeted with malicious harassment known as hate raids that makes brands and sponsors uncomfortable. Through two comparative case studies using inductive critical discourse analysis as well as platformization and cultural industries theoretical frameworks, this dissertation catalogs evidence of how Twitch’s professional relationship with a streamer is largely dependent on the streamer’s perceived brand friendliness, which can be understood as the type of user-engagement they tend to attract

Identities and Intimacies on Social Media

This edited collection illuminates the scope with which identities and intimacies interact on a wide range of social media platforms. A varied range of international scholars examine the contexts of very different social media spaces, with topics ranging from whitewashing and memes, parental discourses in online activities, Spotify as an intimate social media platform, neoliberalisation of feminist discourses, digital sex work, social media wars in trans debates and ‘BimboTok’. The focus is on their acceleration and impact due to the specificities of social media in relation to identities, intimacies within the broad ‘political’ sphere. The geographic range of case study material reflects the global impact of social media, and includes data from Belgium, Canada, China, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the USA. This enlightening and rigorous collection will be of key interest to scholars in media studies and gender studies, and to scholars and professionals of social media. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

Digital Business Models

This book provides an overview of how digital players create, exchange and capture value thanks to digital technologies. It describes the key characteristics of various digital business models using different business archetypes. Each chapter is illustrated with examples or mini-case studies and also comprises a toolbox describing strategic tools, canvases and frameworks that help managers analyse a situation and formulate proactive solutions