Consuming Crisis: Commodifying Care and COVID-19, and coauthor of Black Oot Here: Black Lives in Scotland. She researches the power and politics of media and the marketplace. Her work focuses on digital remix culture, Black diaspora, archives, feminism, nostalgia, creative and cultural work, pop culture, branding, and devolved nations.
Sobande applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Big Brands Are Watching You: Marketing Social Justice and Digital Culture, and reported the following:
Big Brands Are Watching You addresses conversations, collisions, and contrasts between advertising, activism, and digital culture. Focusing on the US and the UK, I examine various marketing, advertising, and popular culture examples as part of my analysis of current claims, contestations, and commodified concepts of morality. In addition to examining narratives in TV shows such as Succession, I reflect on insights yielded from research interviews, a survey, and archived collections on the cultural memory of advertising and its role in the branding of nations and their history.Visit Francesca Sobande's website.
Building on prior studies of the fraught dynamic between consumer culture, countercultures, and community organizing, I outline the concepts of “single-use social justice” and “brands’ disposable duties” to describe the ephemeral and digitally mediated ways that brands gesture towards social justice without undertaking substantial actions. Accounting for the impacts of structural power relations and forms of oppression, this book contends with when, why, and how brands comment on certain issues of injustice and disregard others. This involves me discussing related questions regarding the monetization of antagonism online and the commercialization of concepts connected to contemporary social and political movements.
Page 99 falls in Chapter 2, which follows a detailed introductory chapter, titled “Setting the Scene: Social Justice for Sale”. Turning my attention to “Nation-branding, The Monarchy, and Celebrity Culture”, page 99 focuses on social media messaging and digital content that promoted the Platinum Pudding – a competition-winning recipe that was part of many activities and events marking the UK’s Platinum Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II. Discussing the highly publicized Platinum Jubilee, page 99 reflects on the extravagance of such celebrations and extensive media coverage of the monarch’s death in the months that followed. Here, I emphasize that such well-resourced celebrations and high-profile media coverage of Britain’s monarchy jarringly contrasts with the UK government overlooking ordinary people’s calls for more meaningful forms of memorializing loved ones during the COVID-19 crisis.
In other words: “Witnessing brands—commercial and otherwise—declaring their condolences and quickly offering up products to memorialize the queen, I reflected on the marketing of mourning and the commodification of grief”, including how race, class, imperialism, and other systems of oppression impact who a nation’s public officials do (and do not) frame as worthy of national mourning.
While page 99 provides a glimpse of some of the ways that I critically discuss dimensions of power, politics, and marketing throughout my work, the book is far from being an account of the relationship between media, marketing, and the British monarchy. Rather, page 99 presents one of many examples that I discuss as part of a broader and in-depth account of the ways that morality and its mediated nature manifest in the marketplace.
--Marshal Zeringue
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