Embedded Advertising and the Venture Consumer

Embedded advertising—marketing that promotes brands from within entertainment content—is a thriving, rapidly changing practice. Analysts estimate that embedded advertising expenditures will exceed $10 billion in 2010. The market continues to grow even as traditional advertising revenues contract. The relatively few legal scholars who have studied embedded advertising believe that it is under-regulated. Ineffective regulation, they claim, is deeply troubling because corporations may, with legal impunity, deceptively pitch products to trusting viewers. Critics charge that embedded advertising creates hyper-commercialism, distorts consumers\u27 tastes, taints the artistic process, and erodes faith in public discourse. This Article argues that the critics are wrong. Sponsorship disclosure law under the Communications Act of 1934 and related regulations is indeed largely ineffective, in part because the media industry has consolidated considerably and in part because the drafters could not imagine the diverse ways we create and consume media content in the twenty-first century. Congress conceived the law not only for yesterday\u27s marketplace, but also for yesterday\u27s consumer. The media consumer today is a venture consumer. Often, she knows what she wants, knows where to get it, and is aware of the risks and costs involved. The mismatch between regulators\u27 imagined consumer and the contemporary consumer means that expanded regulation of embedded advertising according to current reform proposals could end up harming consumers more than helping them. Moreover, embedded advertising is not especially amenable to effective regulation, given the incentives for artists and advertisers to collaborate in the production of entertainment content. In light of both the difficulty of correcting the regime\u27s flaws and the consumer interests threatened by expanded regulation, this Article concludes that maintaining the law as-is—rather than expanding it through the proposed reforms—better serves the consumer

Understanding Social Media Shopping : Instagram and the reconfiguration of the practice of shopping

In the recent past, social media has gradually evolved from a platfrom for communication and personal exchange to a space where contemporary consumer desires are awakened, directed, and also fulfilled. Instagram, in particular, is one of the social media platforms that has made specific design decisions to combine the social and entertaining aspects of the native, virtual social media experience with shopping and consumption. At the same time, Instagram and similar platforms have become an integral and meaningful part of many people’s daily routines.Based on these considerations, this dissertation examines the consequences of introducing social media to thepractice of shopping. Using a sociomaterial practice approach, it examines how social media – as a sociomaterial assemblage – reconfigures shopping. Drawing on a digital ethnography centering on Instagram as the research field for collecting empirical material, it conceptualizes and vividly illustrates how social media shopping is emerging as a new form of shopping, what defines, enables, and constrains it, and shows how social media ultimately shapes practical shopping enactments.Moreover, this work conceptualizes the social media shopper as a hybrid actor that is shaped and constituted by both virtual and analog, both human and non-human entities. It presents how this actor, referred to as the ”social media shopper”, is gradually taking shape in and through practice, while also pointing to the consequences that this form of shopping has for its practitioners’ everyday lives. It is shown that social media shopping can be both a leisure activity and a demanding profession – often resulting in practitioners having to meet different demands at the same time. For example, they often feel challenged as they must simultaneously cater to their audience and their personal relationships, or maintain individuality and authenticity while adhering to specific social media scripts.As such, this work expands our understanding of how humans and technologies interact and constitute eachother. This dissertation also allows us to more critically understand the role that technology plays in everyday life by illuminating both positive and negative implications. By showing how social media contributes to the blurring of previously established boundaries and roles – such as buyer/seller or digital/analog etc. – it demonstrates that social media is decisively contributing to shopping becoming an integral part of the mundane and ordinary life of a mostly young, very social media-savvy consumer group. This dissertation therefore offers new insights into the understanding of novel, technology-driven consumption habits, and sheds light on a special group of consumers who have firmly integrated social media into their everyday lives. In doing so, it contributes to the broader discussion on the transformation and digitalization of retail

Three Essays On Interfirm Interdependence And Firm Performance

This dissertation explicitly examines the structure of interdependencies that firms are subjected to within a platform-based ecosystem and its implications for firm performance. Two theoretical themes emerge from this dissertation: (1) a firm’s interdependence with other actors in the ecosystem matters both for its performance and the sustainability of its superior performance; and (2) a manager’s understanding of these interdependencies can have significant implications on firm performance and the choice of governance structures. The first essay explores how a firm’s innovation differs with respect to its interdependence with various elements of the ecosystem and examines its implications on the innovation’s commercialization success. The core set of data is based on all the apps that were launched in the Apple iPhone ecosystem from 2008 to 2013. The results suggest that firms can enhance the value of their innovation by drawing on the broader set of complementary technologies that are available in the ecosystem. But, these complementarities also subject firms to an array of bottlenecks limiting their innovation’s value creation. The second essay examines how ecosystem-level interdependencies affect the extent to which firms can sustain their value creation in a platform-based ecosystem. The analysis is based on a panel dataset of top-performing app developers in the iOS and Android ecosystems from January 2012 to January 2014. The results suggest that a firm’s ability to sustain its superior performance is facilitated by the technological interdependence faced by its innovation within an ecosystem and the experience gained within the ecosystem, but hampered by technological transitions initiated by the central firm. The third essay addresses the performance consequences of misrepresentation of interdependence structures in the alliance context using an agent-based simulation. The results suggest that the misrepresentation of interdependence structures plays an important role in determining performance consequences of various governance modes to manage the alliance relationship. Specifically, overrepresentation of interdependence structures requires fully integrated or more hierarchical governance modes, whereas underrepresentation of interdependence structures requires more decentralized governance modes. Collectively, these essays contribute to the literature on ecosystems and alliances, shedding new light on the role of structure of interdependence ins shaping firm’s performance

Individual Hosts Vs. Company Hosts on Airbnb: Role of Authenticity and Trust on Consumers’ Behavioral Intentions

Airbnb has become a dominant player in the sharing economy. Authenticity is one of Airbnb’s fundamental key factor, but recent hospitality studies lack addressing types of hosts and how they compare in terms of different dimensions of authenticity affecting consumers’ trust in hosts. The current study identifies two types of Airbnb hosts, individual hosts and company hosts, and aims to examine the role of authenticity and trust in hosts on consumer’s intention to revisit and recommend Airbnb. The findings suggest that there exist positive relationships between dimensions of authenticity and trust in hosts and between trust in hosts and behavioral intentions. The relationship between existential authenticity and trust in hosts is strengthened for company hosts than for individual hosts. The study may contribute to P2P literature portfolio in terms of types of hosts and provide implications to both P2P individual hosts and company hosts

Exploring Branding Practices of Swedish Start-ups

Brand management of start-ups is an under-researched area of study. The aim of this study is to uncover the branding practices of start-ups in Sweden and specifically to examine the perceived importance of branding, identify the brand identity creation process, reveal the brand positioning strategies employed by such firms and expose the most relevant brand building activities among the field