Session Chair: Tanya Horeck
Presentation 1
Beyond Pink: Vernacular Manifestations of Gendered Platform Capitalism in the Color Features of YouTube Thumbnails
Tommaso Trillò(1), Eedan Amit-Danhi(2)
1: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel; 2: University of Groningen, Netherlands
This paper investigates the color-genre-audience associations characterizing YouTube’s platform vernacular through a pixel-level analysis of 40K thumbnails representing ten popular user-generated genres. Despite its thriving creator economy and a its pivotal role as site of identity performance, YouTube remains a vastly understudied platform. Our specific focus is on the gendered character of these associations. Color is regularly leveraged by marketing campaigns to indicate a gendered target-audience, most notably through the use of the color pink as a marker of femininity. Given the bottom-up character of YouTube’s platform vernacular, however, the extent to which thumbnails reproduce the color-based tropes of mass consumer culture remains an open question. Hence, we compare the color characteristics of five female-catering and five masculine- or ambiguously-facing YouTube genres. We utilize computational tools to measure and statistically compare a decade of thumbnails for each of the selected genre based on their dominant colors, colorfulness, brightness and saturation. We find that female-catering genres are significantly brighter and less colorful than the other genres in our sample, presenting a narrow color-palette featuring shades of pink, gray, silver or white. Hence, while the color profile of femininity in YouTube genres does exceed the equation feminine=pink, it remains confined to a narrow and easily identifiable color palette. We conclude our paper by suggesting that the gendered color-genre-audience associations characterizing YouTube’s platform vernacular seek to capture the glance of the intended audience in order to compete in the attention economy of social media, thus reflecting a largely commercialized platform imaginary.
Presentation 2
IMAGE OF WOMEN IN ADVERTISING: A THEMATIC ANALYSIS OF THE CHINA-US MEDIA ADVERTISING
Yuan Xu
University of Pennsylvania, United States of America
Social media advertising is gradually becoming a new trend in the advertising industry, as it highlights enduring gender stereotypes and objectification seen in fashion and luxury brand advertising. This study concentrates on gender representation in social media advertising, analyzing 635 images from leading fashion brands such as Dior, Gucci, Prada, Versace, Givenchy, and Louis Vuitton on Instagram (U.S.) and Xiaohongshu (China) from November 2022 to January 2023. It explores cultural differences in gender image between the United States and China, assessing how female representation has evolved and examining the persistence of traditional gender objectification in these new advertising contexts.
Different from prior studies, which often depicted women as subordinate, our findings indicate an increase in authoritative or equal roles for women in both countries. However, ads on Instagram display diverse representations, while Xiaohongshu ads tend to adhere to traditional beauty standards. The emergence of gender-fluid advertising on Instagram challenges binary gender norms, reflecting the U.S.'s growing acceptance of diverse gender identities. Moreover, the analysis reveals distinct user engagement patterns: Instagram users critically engage with ad narratives, while Xiaohongshu users primarily focus on aesthetics and product details. Nevertheless, women are still objectified in different ways on both platforms, such as through brand-concept ads on Instagram and product-based ads on Xiaohongshu.
These findings highlight a gradual shift towards more inclusive representations of women in fashion advertising, though challenges remain. The paper calls for ongoing improvements in advertising approaches to better respect and represent all genders, reflecting evolving societal values and norms.
Presentation 3
Beauty brands online: Visuality, labour, and representation
Anuja Premika
University of Hyderabad, India
Engagement with beauty has historically been seen as inherently consumptive and (perhaps therefore) inherently feminine and trivial. Popular discourse today would suggest, however, that beauty is increasingly seen as creative, and no longer assumed to be the domain of any one gender, particularly in online spaces. Amidst celebrations of the democratisation of beauty on one end, and cries of an appearance-obsessed culture on the other, what does a situated feminist examination of online beauty culture tell us today? This paper maps the practices of beauty brands online by analysing 545 Instagram posts made by the five most followed beauty brands in India to examine whom they represent and how, but also how these images are produced at the intersection of techno-aesthetic choices, platform affordances, market considerations, and the modes of gendered identity privileged by culture at a given point in time. In the Indian context, where gendered labour precarity has been baked into the social system, and the promise of transformation through digital democratisation runs loud in socio-political discourse, the beauty brand on Instagram offers a site to examine new modes of gendered precarious labour and economic insecurity. At the same time, it also points to the new ecology of beauty media today: the actors and technologies that make it possible, the opportunities it presents, and the new aesthetics and production modes it affords. This work speaks to broader cultures around appearance and gendered self-presentation, and the nebulous nature of labour and influence in today’s media environment.
Presentation 4
MULTI-LEVEL MARKETING ON TIKTOK: COMMODIFIED FEMINISM AND CROSS-PLATFORM AWARENESS CONTEXTS
Andreas Gregersen, Jacob Ørmen, Nane Leonie Niemann, Anne Mette Thorhauge
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
This paper presents a conceptually oriented interpretation of findings from a case study of finance-related TikTok in Germany, focusing on a subset of accounts which utilize multi-level marketing (MLM) schemes. MLM phenomena are widespread but relatively under-described both in general social science research and within social media research. We conceptualize and analyze MLMs as a phenomenon which is at once highly specific and quite general. Current MLM operations are highly specific in terms of the platformized communication strategies and the intended customer funneling operations across platforms. The prototypical communications structure involves a series of communication phenomena tailored to create specific awareness contexts, each taking advantage of platform-specific genres and content niches as well as platform-specific communication features such as mass dissemination and direct messaging. At the same time, these operations clearly resemble those identified in scholarship on multi-level-marketing operations that predate flatforms. In turn, these operations can be understood in the larger context of contemporary commodified feminism.
