Zendaya: Audience and Industries
Audience
Smart Water brand case study
Zendaya has been announced as the Global Brand Ambassador for smartwater. As ambassador for the premium water brand, Zendaya will appear in a series of new creative celebrating those defining ‘smart’ on their own terms, and support community water programmes that directly impact women.
She will work with the Global Water Challenge, a charity working to help achieve universal access to clean drinking water, by launching the smart solutions: global water challenge, inviting local organisations to apply for funding to GWC’s women for water action platform.
“We could not be more thrilled to have Zendaya join smartwater as the newest face of our brand,” said Matrona Filippou, Global Category President, Hydration, Sports, Tea & Coffee, The Coca-Cola Company. “A global icon and cultural force, Zendaya isn’t afraid to be true to herself, and that’s what makes her the perfect addition to the smartwater family.”
“I’m very excited to begin this new relationship with smartwater,” said Zendaya. “We all know how important it is to stay hydrated and smartwater is my go-to source no matter what I am doing throughout the day.”
185,328,761
Followers3.43%
Engagement Rate3.42%
Likes RateFeminist discourse has always addressed the imbalance of power between the traditional gender roles. We have already seen Zendaya’s determination to construct representations through her acting and modelling work which inspire and empower women to take control of their future and have their voices heard. She is very articulate when discussing her views on equality. In an interview with The Female Lead, she said “a feminist is someone who believes in the power of a woman the same way they believe in the power of anyone else”.
Zendaya also positions herself as an intersectional feminist seeking ways to address issues that affect women from all backgrounds regardless of their ethnicity, class, and sexuality. When she was featured as the cover star of Cosmopolitan’s July 2016 issue, she told the publication “It’s hard as a young person of a different ethnicity or background to look at the TV and not see anyone who looks like you. Representation is very important.”
In the traditional model of media consumption, audiences simply read the newspapers and watched television programmes produced by the large media outlets. Moving from the broadcast to broadband, social media has enabled audiences to be active participants and engage directly with the content creators. Clay Shirky argued this shift in consumption challenges the old power structures and offers new opportunities for individuals to shape the world.
We have already analysed the different ways Zendaya uses social media platforms to start conversations with her followers. But we have also seen how many of these posts are partnerships with luxury brands and promotional pieces for her acting work. Despite the huge increase in user-generated content and the mass amateurisation of production, the media conglomerates and global enterprises can still exercise their power through these social networks to reach their target audience.
Media Effects theories attempt to explain how content can influence the audience and society as a whole. For example, George Gerbner investigated the impact of television on the viewer’s attitudes and beliefs. Known as the cultivation theory, he argued heavy users of television were more likely to view the world as hostile and violent because they saw those representations on the screen. Albert Bandura also showed viewers would imitate behaviour they observed on television through a process he called symbolic modelling.
We should also consider to what extent Zendaya’s posts and tweets satisfy the needs of the audience. The uses and gratifications theory suggests we use the media to help construct our personal identity. Perhaps her followers are motivated to engage with her empowering messages because they want to emulate that success and confidence in their own lives. Some users might be inspired by her fashion sense and buy the products.
This isn’t a unique observation, but it’s a crucial one: If you’re not paying for the product, the product is you. The real transaction here isn’t you receiving enjoyment in the form of a free temporary distraction created by a media company at great expense. That media company renting your eyeballs to its advertisers.
For many people, this is most obvious in the television industry. CBS doesn’t come up with a new episode of NCIS every week strictly to please viewers with a limitless capacity for being passively entertained. It’s because you and 12 million other people will watch that episode, and thus pay at least subconscious attention to the 16 minutes of commercials that are interspersed throughout it.
For a car manufacturer or fast-food restaurant, there are few more efficient ways to grab customers’ attention, something CBS and its rival networks are well aware of. Media companies are interested in pleasing the brewer before the viewer.
Other social media companies are also exploring new ways to increase their revenue. For example, after Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he changed the site's blue "verified" checkmark system. These checkmarks were once given to prominent or important accounts (such as journalists, politicians, celebrities, and newspapers, and other media accounts) to show that their identities had been verified and could be trusted.
One of its suggestions is that social networks should be required to release detail of their algorithms and core functions to trusted researchers, in order for the technology to be vetted.
It also suggests adding "friction" to online sharing, to prevent the rampant spread of disinformation.
The report was published by the Forum for Information and Democracy, which was established to make non-binding recommendations to 38 countries. They include Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, South Korea and the UK.
One of the core recommendations is the creation of a "statutory building code", which describes mandatory safety and quality requirements for digital platforms.
"If I were to produce a kitchen appliance, I have to do more safety testing and go through more compliance procedures to create a toaster than to create Facebook," Mr Wylie told the BBC.
He said social networks should be required to weigh up all the potential harms that could be caused by their design and engineering decisions.
The way Facebook approaches these problems is: we'll wait and see and figure out a problem when it emerges. Every other industry has to have minimum safety standards and consider the risks that could be posed to people, through risk mitigation and prevention.
If you regulated the big social networks, would it push more people on to fringe "free speech" social networks?
If you have a platform that has the unique selling point of "we will allow you to promote hate speech, we will allow you to deceive and manipulate people", I do not think that business model should be allowed in its current form. Platforms that monetise user engagement have a duty to their users to make at least a minimum effort to prevent clearly identified harms. I think it's ridiculous that there's more safety consideration for creating a toaster in someone's kitchen, than for platforms that have had such a manifest impact on our public health response and democratic institutions.
This is a product of a platform that is making recommendations to you. These algorithms work by picking up what you engage with and then they show you more and more of that.
In the report, we talk about a "cooling-off period". You could require algorithms to have a trigger that results in a cooling-off period for a certain type of content.
If it has just spent the past week showing you body-building ads, it could then hold off for the next two weeks. If you want to promote body building, you can.
But from the user's perspective, they should not be constantly bombarded with a singular theme.
8) Can we apply any of these criticisms or suggestions to Zendaya? For example, should Zendaya have to explicitly make clear when she is being paid to promote a company or cause?
If you have a platform that has the unique selling point of "we will allow you to promote hate speech, we will allow you to deceive and manipulate people", I do not think that business model should be allowed in its current form. Platforms that monetise user engagement have a duty to their users to make at least a minimum effort to prevent clearly identified harms.
However in some forms it is quite evident if celebrities are being paid or not since being a celebrities comes with a lot of sponsorships and being bran ambassadors.
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