1) What is the charity link to her Smart Water brand ambassador role and how does this link to the celebrity persona she has created?
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.
2) Read the analysis of Zendaya’s social media profile. What statistics support why she is described as ‘a high-ranking celebrity influencer’?
“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.”
3) What details are provided about Zendaya’s audience?
Drinks brand smartwater speaks to a 59% female audience across both Instagram and Twitter. Single or married, its followers are most typically 25-29, though its reach expands both younger and older.
4) What psychographic groups would fit the profile for Zendaya’s audience in this case study?
Professionally-speaking, smartwater is followed by marketers, bloggers, fashion stylists, performers and company directors on Instagram, and marketers, social media specialists, PR specialists, bloggers, designers and real estate agents on Twitter. Looking at likes and interests, this group enjoy music, soft drinks, fast food, film and TV, clothing, dance, theme parks, coffee and sport. Zendaya appears in the list of high-ranking celebrity influences (alongside Selena Gomez, Bill Gates and Miley Cyrus), ranking in the top 10% of all Twitter accounts, with 25.4% share.
5) Why does the case study suggest Zendaya is a good fit for the Smart Water brand?
Overall, Zendaya and smartwater are more or less aligned when it comes to age, gender and location demographics. It may be that the brand are hoping the star will raise its profile with younger consumers, as well as tapping into her 190m social reach and over £1m social media value. Zendaya also has well above average equity, appeal and awareness scores and is one of the biggest names on the planet right now. She is no stranger to brand partnerships, but this marks her first drinks collaboration and continues her philanthropic project work.
Social media data analysis
1) Pick out three notable statistics from the site.
2) Scroll down through the data available. Who are Zendaya’s top mentions and what does this suggest about how she uses the account?
Top @Mentions
Top mentions from the last 10 posts
3) How does Zendaya’s Instagram engagement rate of 3%+ compare with the average engagement rate for accounts with more than 100,000 followers?
It is almost double the average engagement rate of accounts with more than 100k followers.
Zendaya: audience questions and theories
Finally, work through the following questions to apply media debates and theories to the Zendaya CSP:
1) Is Zendaya’s website and social media constructed to appeal to a particular gender or audience?
It is constructed to appeal to a diverse audience. However, her audience is dominantly more female.
2) What opportunities are there for audience interaction in Zendaya’s online presence and how controlled are these?
It allows lots of interaction such as likes, comments and shares. However, this can be heavily moderated in order to keep a positive environment and can be selective with the comments.
3) How does Zendaya’s social media presence reflect Clay Shirky’s ‘End of Audience’ theories?
There is 2 way communication between Zendaya and her audience. This is because of direct messages and comments. This breaks traditional media.
4) What effects might Zendaya’s online presence have on audiences? Is it designed to influence the audience’s views on social or political issues or is this largely a vehicle to promote Zendaya’s work?
She mainly uses platforms to promote her work and movies but occasionally addresses social issues to raise awareness and cause discussion.
5) Applying Hall’s Reception theory, what might be a preferred and oppositional reading of Zendaya’s online presence?
The preferred reading is that Zendaya wants to inspire the audience while the oppositional reading is that her social media identity is seen as constructed.
Industries
How social media companies make money
1) How many users do the major social media sites boast?
As of Q4 2022, Meta, formerly Facebook, had 2.96 billion monthly active users.1 Twitter (now X) stopped reporting monthly active users, but the last count in Q1 2019 was 330 million, while LinkedIn had about 900 million monthly active users as of Q1 2023.
2) What is the main way social media sites make money?
- Social media companies like Meta (formerly Facebook) and X Corp. (formerly Twitter Inc.), primarily make money through selling advertising.
- Television, newspapers, and media companies have been making money via advertising long before social media.
3) What does ARPU stand for and why is it important for social media companies?
There’s a reason why Meta’s 10-K filing with the U. S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) uses the acronym ARPU, which means average revenue per user.
Meta's ARPU at the end of 2022 was $39.63. Multiply that by the aforementioned estimated user base for Q4 2022 to get a total revenue approximation, and now you can understand why Meta had a market capitalization of over $1 trillion at its height.
4) Why has Meta spent huge money acquiring other brands like Instagram and WhatsApp?
Growing Meta’s user base to the point where it reached critical mass was obviously important to the company’s operations, but only to the extent that it provided something to attract advertisers. To an uninterested observer, committing $19 billion to acquire the texting application WhatsApp might sound like the height of dot-com-era hubris and recklessness. But it wasn't.
WhatsApp boasts over 2 billion monthly active users, which to Meta management means an even greater stock of susceptible minds to sell as a unit to companies looking to, for instance, move a few more smartphones this quarter.11 Every acquisition Meta has made since, whether it was $1 billion for Instagram or $19 billion for WhatsApp, was conducted with the same goal in mind.12
5) What other methods do social media sites have to generate income e.g. Twitter Blue?
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.
Regulation of social media
1) What suggestions does the report make? Pick out three you think are particularly interesting.
One of its suggestions is that social networks should be required to release details 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.
2) Who is Christopher Wylie?
Among those contributing to the report were Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie, and former Facebook investor Roger McNamee - a long-time critic of the social network.
3) What does Wylie say about the debate between media regulation and free speech?
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.
4) What is ‘disinformation’ and do you agree that there are things that are objectively true or false?
The report also suggests social networks should display a correction to every single person who was exposed to misinformation, if independent fact-checkers identify a story as false.
5) Why does Wylie compare Facebook to an oil company?
An oil company would say: "We do not profit from pollution." Pollution is a by-product - and a harmful by-product. Regardless of whether Facebook profits from hate or not, it is a harmful by-product of the current design and there are social harms that come from this business model.
6) What does it suggest a consequence of regulating the big social networks might be?
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.
7) What has Instagram been criticised for?
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. 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.
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