This project examines luxury fashion brands’ use of digital media regarding the LGBTQIA+ communities. Luxury brands promote their products or services on platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, and a host of other social media services (Yu & Ko, 2021; Zhang, Liu, & Lang, 2022). While Luxury brands consciously decide to promote and advertise to LGBTQIA+ members, the same luxury brands tend to exclude LGBTQIA+ members from the imagery on their digital platforms.

In this project, we examine how four luxury brands represent LGBTQIA+ members, and how these representations align with the brands’ stated policies. News articles, press releases, organizational policies, and related Instagram posts from 2020-2023 were collected for Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Hermes, and Savage. Our analysis points to several key findings: The impact of “cancel culture” on luxury brands; a distinction between reactive versus active engagement with LGBTQIA+ communities; a tension between brands’ policies and social media representation; and the importance of authenticity when branding to diverse audiences.

The podcasting landscape has been reshaped in the past several years by acquisitions and mergers among players in the industry. Major platform services like Spotify, SiriusXM, iHeartMedia, Google, and Apple have all attempted to more closely bind consumers to their proprietary services, threatening the open architecture of distribution via RSS. While control and monetization of intellectual property is one key driver of platformization in podcasting, another key institutional shift is being accelerated these changes: the datafication of the audience. In short, datafication involves the quantification of human activity to enable surveillance, prediction, and mass customization of advertising.

In this paper, I explore one significant impact of widescale platformization within podcasting: the emergence of programmatic advertising markets. By essentially “listening in” to these industry discourses about podcast advertising (in podcasts and in the Podcast Upfront presentations from Spring 2022), this essay outlines the importance of platform-to-platform data transactions and highlights the resulting shifts in the podcasting ecosystem: away from the intimate, relationship-driven ethos of the medium and toward a quantitative, surveillance-driven ecosystem.

This paper examines how dominant institutional actors exercise power and control over the digital advertising ecosystem. It pursues this inquiry through a case study on the 2021 introduction of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature—a privacy setting newly integrated in the operating system of iOS mobile devices. Developing this case study, we ask: How do dominant market actors exercise control over the infrastructural layers of the ‘mobile ad stack’ and how do they gain access to end-user data? These questions are addressed through a mix-methods approach that involves (A) analysis of developer documentation provided by Apple, (B) a review of ongoing litigation, and (C) analysis of financial disclosure forms of two ad-driven platforms Meta and Snapchat. This inquiry shows, first, how and why Facebook and Google, each in their own way, have been highly successful in their ability to aggregate both ad inventory and accurate, real-time user data. Second, it demonstrates how ATT blocked the access of advertising platforms to a key part of this real-time user data, while, simultaneously, enabling Apple to gain control over end-users’ mobile data. Thus, the rollout of ATT and its subsequent shifts in revenue and data demonstrate the relational and constantly evolving nature of institutional power in the mobile advertising ecosystem.

The digital advertising industry is bracing itself for a world where the third-party and cross-context tracking it has relied on may be restricted by design or by law. Companies like Google and Meta are reacting to regulatory headwinds, infrastructural changes, cultural shifts, and economic turmoil by publicizing a range of technological solutions that promise to preserve existing optimization capabilities without flouting users’ expectations or data governance laws. The adtech sector is becoming resigned to a new privacy imperative.

The concept of digital resignation typically refers to how companies make individuals feel a sense of powerlessness about privacy, leaving data subjects exposed to unwanted tracking and exploitation. Our paper looks through this optic from the other end of the lens: How is the digital advertising industry coping with the increasing salience of privacy as a policy and public-relations issue?

Our paper shows that companies are performing “privacy” without making meaningful change. We argue that adtech's pivot to privacy, while including some good-faith attempts at progress, ultimately amount to a form of privacy cynicism. We characterize some key strategic maneuvers being executed by means of these privacy solutions: magic tech-washing (using computational techniques to obfuscate data flows and sanitize surveillance or discrimination); party hopping (pursuing more invasive first-party tracking, or turning third-party data into first-party data via partnerships and acquisitions); and sabotage (using “privacy” to disadvantage rivals and increase market power).

For more than a decade, digital advertising has been the primary means of funding online content and services. The evolution of digital advertising towards algorithmically targeted advertising, believed to be highly personalized and tailored to the individual, has presented new challenges for public oversight. Whereas previously, public concern centred on the content of ads and their exposure to audiences, the rise of platform-based advertising means focus has shifted to the distribution of ads and how they reach us. In response to public concerns and regulatory pressures, companies such as Meta (the parent of Facebook) have introduced transparency tools for researchers and consumers to ‘explain’ the function of advertising on the platform, including the Ad Library and the “Why Am I Seeing This Ad” feature. Despite being a central feature of Meta’s response towards increasing external scrutiny, little is known about how the WAIST feature works, or how it operates at a population level. In response we offer a description of WAIST data collected at scale, informed from a nationwide citizen data donation project of Facebook advertising. We analyse this data with a view to better understand Meta’s algorithmic advertising system, and to inform questions regarding the sufficiency of WAIST as an algorithmic explanatory mechanism for users.