Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

6-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Sociology

Advisor

Jessie Daniels

Committee Members

Erica Chito-Childs

Juan Battle

Sharon Zukin

Subject Categories

Political Economy | Politics and Social Change | Race and Ethnicity | Sociology of Culture | Work, Economy and Organizations

Keywords

digital sociology, natural language processing, marketing, consumer culture, social movements

Abstract

In this dissertation, I explore how corporations engage in values-based marketing in the 21st Century. It is hardly a new phenomenon for corporate advertising to co-opt popular cultural values and trends. With the rise of platform capitalism — under which digital platforms generate wealth by cultivating our online data and resell it to advertisers — as well as the political and social context of the Trump Administration, however, major corporations have entered a new phase in the marketing framework that aims to attract consumers based specifically on their cultural and political values. Using a mixed methods approach I explore the current trends in advertising at the highest levels, including major media events like the Super Bowl and digital advertisements that litter our social media feeds daily. In the first methodology, I created a data set of 316 Super Bowl commercials from 2016 to 2021 and employed a Natural Language Processing tool called Latent Dirichlet Allocation to identify 12 key thematic elements across all 3026 commercials. Then, I conducted a qualitative textual analysis of each commercial to confirm and analyze the themes identified in my topic modeling method. Finally, I conducted nine target interviews with corporate leaders and advertising workers to uncover the processes by which corporations produce and disseminate values-based advertising. What I found is that while corporations are extremely adept at co-opting shifting cultural values in the consumer landscape, most advertisements are not exactly political outside of a specific socio-cultural context. That is, it’s true that advertisers want to appeal to your habits, likes, and dislikes, but the narrative of an overwhelmingly “woke” consumer marketplace is largely a myth created by the right-wing media ecosystem to weaponize white male rage.

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