Visibility labour: Engaging with Influencers’ fashion brands and #OOTD advertorial campaigns on Instagram

Abstract

Influencer commerce has experienced an exponential growth, resulting in new forms of digital practices among young women. Influencers are one form of microcelebrity who accumulate a following on blogs and social media through textual and visual narrations of their personal, everyday lives, upon which advertorials for products and services are premised. In Singapore, Influencers are predominantly young women whose commercial practices are most noted on Instagram. In response, everyday users are beginning to model after Influencers through tags, reposts and #OOTDs (Outfit Of The Day), unwittingly producing volumes of advertising content that is not only encouraged by Influencers and brands but also publicly utilised with little compensation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Instagram Influencers and followers in Singapore, this article investigates the visibility labour in which followers engage on follower-anchored Instagram advertorials, in an attention economy that has swiftly profited off work that is quietly creative but insidiously exploitative.

Keywords

advertorials followers Influencers Instagram OOTD social media

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Abidin

(2014a) #In$tagLam: Instagram as a repository of taste, a brimming marketplace, a war of eyeballs. In: Berry

Schleser

(eds) Mobile Media Making in the Age of Smartphones. New York: Palgrave Pivot, pp. 119–128.

Abidin

(2014b) #hashtagmylife. In: PopAnth, 27 February. Available at: https://popanth.com/article/hashtagmylife (accessed 15 April 2016).

Abidin

(2015) Communicative <3 intimacies: Influencers and perceived interconnectedness. Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, & Technology 8. Available at: http://adanewmedia.org/2015/11/issue8-abidin/ (accessed 15 April 2016).

Abidin

(2016) Aren’t these just young, rich women doing vain things online? Influencer selfies as subversive frivolity. Social Media + Society 2(2): 1–17.

Abidin

Thompson

(2012) Buymylife.com: cyberfemininities and commercial intimacy in blogshops. Women’s Studies International Forum 35: 467–477.

Aw Yeong

(2013) Instagram is fastest growing media application among mobile-savvy users here. The New Paper. Available at: http://www2.tnp.sg/content/instagram-fastest-growing-media-application-among-mobile-savvy-users-here (accessed 15 April 2016).

Bailey

(2016) Performance Anxiety in Media Culture: The Trauma of Appearance and the Drama of Disappearance. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Banet-Weiser

(2012) Authentic TM: The Politics and Ambivalence in a Brand Culture. New York: New York University Press.

Blom

Hansen

(2015) Click bait: forward-reference as lure in online news headlines. Journal of Pragmatics 76: 87–100.

10.

Bucher

(2012) Want to be on the top? Algorithmic power and the threat of invisibility on Facebook. New Media & Society 14(7): 1164–1180.

11.

Carah

Shaul

(2016) Brands and Instagram: point, tap, swipe, glance. Mobile Media & Communication 4(1): 69–84.

12.

Duffy

(2015) The gendered politics of digital brand labor. In: Antenna. Available at: http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/2015/03/18/the-gendered-politics-of-digital-brand-labor/ (accessed 15 April 2016).

13.

Duffy

(2016) The romance of work: gender and aspirational labour in the digital culture industries. International Journal of Cultural Studies 19(4): 441–457.

14.

Erkan

(2015) Electronic word of mouth on Instagram: customers’ engagements with brands in different sectors. International Journal of Management, Accounting and Economics 2(12): 1435–1444.

15.

Glaser

(1978) Theoretical Sensitivity: Advances in the Methodology of Grounded Theory. Mill Valley, CA: Sociology Press.

16.

Goldhaber

(1997) The attention economy and the net. First Monday 2(4). Available at: http://firstmonday.org/article/view/519/440 (accessed 15 April 2016).

17.

Gurrieri

Cherrier

(2013) Queering beauty: fatshionistas in the fatosphere. Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal 16(3): 276–295.

18.

Hardt

(1999) Affective labor. boundary 2 26(2): 89–100.

19.

Hopkins

Thomas

(2011) Fielding networked marketing: technology and authenticity in the monetization of Malaysian blogs. In: Araya

Breindi

Tessa

(eds) Nexus: New Intersections in Internet Research. New York: Peter Lang, pp. 139–156.

20.

Horton

Wohl

(1956) Mass communication and para-social interaction. Psychiatry 19(3): 215–229; Republished in Particip@tions 3(1). Available at: http://www.participations.org/volume%203/issue%201/3_01_hortonwohl.htm (accessed 15 April 2016).

21.

Instagram (2016) FAQ. Available at: https://www.instagram.com/about/faq/ (accessed 15 April 2016).

22.

Katz

Lazarsfeld

(2009) Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

23.

Kozinets

De Valck

Wojnicki

. (2010) Networked narratives: understanding word-of-mouth marketing in online communities. Journal of Marketing 74(2): 71–89.

24.

Kulmala

Mesiranta

Tuominen

(2013) Organic and amplified eWOM in consumer fashion blogs. Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management: An International Journal 17(1): 20–37.

25.

Lee

(2015) How to hide hashtags on Instagram. In: Itchban.com. Available at: http://www.itchban.com/blog/2015/10/28/how-to-hide-hashtags-on-instagram (accessed 15 April 2016).

26.

McQuarrie

Miller

Phillips

(2013) The megaphone effect: taste and audience in fashion blogging. Journal of Consumer Research 40(1): 136–158.

27.

Marwick

(2015) Instafame: luxury selfies in the attention economy. Public Culture 27: 137–160.

28.

Marwick

boyd

(2011) To see and be seen: celebrity practice on Twitter. Convergence 17(2): 139–158.

29.

Neff

Wissinger

Zukin

(2005) Entrepreneurial labor among cultural producers: ‘Cool’ jobs in ‘hot’ industries. Social Semiotics 15(3): 307–334.

30.

Ots

Abidin

(2015) The influencer’s dilemma: the shaping of new brand professions between credibility and commerce. In: Talk presented at the AEJMC. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/16152220/The_Influencer_s_dilemma_The_shaping_of_new_brand_professions_between_credibility_and_commerce (accessed 15 April 2016).

31.

Papacharissi

(2012a) A networked self: identity performance and sociability on social network sites. In: Lee

Leung

Qiu

. (eds) Frontiers in New Media Research. London: Routledge, pp. 207–221.

32.

Papacharissi

(2012b) Without you, I’m nothing: performances of the self on Twitter. International Journal of Communication 6: 1989–2006.

33.

Polanyi

(1958) Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-critical Philosophy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

34.

Roberts

(2005) Lovemarks: The Future beyond Brands. New York: PowerHouse Books.

35.

Senft

(2008) Camgirls: Celebrity and Community in the Age of Social Networks. New York: Peter Lang.

36.

Wissinger

(2015) #NoFilter: models, glamour labor, and the age of the blink (In: Davis

Jurgenson

(eds) Theorizing the Web 2014). Interface 1(1): 1–20. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/20536708/_Nofilter_Models_Glamour_Labor_and_the_Age_of_the_Blink (accessed 15 April 2016).

37.

Zappavigna

(2012) The Discourse of Twitter and Social Media. London: Continuum.