Shareacoke and a Song the Commercialization of User-Generated Short Video Performance on Musical.Ly

#ShareaCoke and a song the commercialization of user-generated short video performance on musical.ly

Simone Magilse 4214110 Master Thesis M.A New Media & Digital Culture Supervisor Benjamin Lenzner Utrecht University 18-06-2018

Abstract

This thesis aims to acknowledge how musical.ly (referred to here as Musical.ly), a social video network, allows for the utilization of user-generated content (UGC), and how this UGC enables commercialization practices within the Web 2.0 media landscape. The purpose of this thesis is to better understand the development of user agency within Musical.ly and to comprehend how it can be situated in the broader scope of UGC and its marketability. To obtain a better understanding, this study has conducted an affordance and textual analysis, examining the Musical.ly platform’s affordances and examining two videos in more detail to provide analysis for UGC on Musical.ly. Using theories concerning user agency, gestural language and brand communities, this research argues that the platform’s affordances allow for a participatory and creative user contribution, which is able to increase a user’s agency, but simultaneously this user agency has the potential to be exploited by the platform and global companies for marketing purposes. This is problematic in the context of Musical.ly because of its young target group of users. It can be concluded that the proliferation of UGC platforms, like Musical.ly, within the Web 2.0 landscape allows for a new marketing/consumer model, which can almost covertly, harness or even exploit users’ watching and uploading behavior.

Keywords: user-generated content, gestural language, commercialization, affordances, user agency, mobile application, short-video

Acknowledgements

I would like to take the opportunity to thank my supervisor Ben Lenzner for his professional guidance, expert advice and encouragement throughout this MA thesis process.

Also, I would like to express my gratitude to Ingrid Hoofd and Stefan Vuurens for helping to coordinate me in my study process at the Utrecht University, and for their understanding and flexibility regarding my physical recovery and setbacks during the Master Program.

Many thanks to Alexandra, for being my study mate and always taking the time to critically edit and review my research.

Furthermore, I express a special gratitude towards my family, my parents, and my brother for their unconditional support and love, and for being my backbones and inspiration.

Last, a special thanks to my good friends, Anniek, Rosan, Puck, Liz, Roos and Francien for your emotional support and listening ears. Thanks to Lars for all those years of encouragement and understanding in pursuing my passions and Mariette and Julia for being the best flat-mates a person could wish for.

I could not have done this without you.

Table of contents

1 Introduction 6 1.1 The proliferation of user-generated video content ...... 6 1.2 Motivation and problem statement ...... 8 1.3 Case study ...... 9 1.4 Positioning ...... 10

2 Methodology ...... 12

3 Theoretical framework ...... 14 3.1 User-generated video content and user agency ...... 14 3.2 Digital communication as gestural language ...... 16 3.3 Exploitation of UGC, harnessing online brand communities ...... 17

4 Analysis ...... 20 4.1 Musical.ly, ‘the MTV for generation Z’ ...... 20 4.2 The edit process: creating a Musical.ly ...... 25 4.3 Share a Coke and a Song: Turning Lyrics into Language ...... 29 4.4 Musical.ly, UGC and #ShareaCoke ...... 31 4.5 Utilizing Musical.ly as brand community ...... 33

5 Conclusion ...... 37 Further research ...... 39

6 Bibliography ...... 41

Plagiarism Rules Awareness Statement 45

List of figures

Figure 1. Home-Screen Musical.ly...... 2 5 Figure 2. Search function and categories ...... 2 5 Figure 3. Examples hashtags ...... 2 5 Figure 4. Baby Ariel Coca-Cola Musical.ly...... 2 8 Figure 5. Personal profile, crown badge Baby Ariel ...... 28 Figure 6. Recording options ...... 2 8 Figure 7. Transition options ...... 28 Figure 8. Thumbnail, caption or sharing features ...... 28 Figure 9. #ShareaCoke videos on Musical.ly...... 30 Figure 10. Musical.ly/Coca-Cola video with hand gestures and transition effects33 Figure 11. Duet function on Musical.ly ...... 3 6

1 Introduction

1.1 The proliferation of user-generated video content

The increase in peer-to-peer service platforms and the proliferation of Web 2.0 user-generated content (UGC) are altering, shaping and threatening user habits and traditional screen-based media practices. Specifically, the expansion of UGC within smartphone apps has cultivated a rapid growth of the commercialization of amateur online video content.1 The proliferation and growing power of UGC has led to more participative and interactive approaches to marketing and branding on social media, by which marketers incorporate UGC as part of their marketing-mix.2 User-generated content video platforms, such as YouTube (the third most visited website worldwide), are highly visited by a young generation who like, share, comment, watch, and upload videos intensively. 3 This user activity creates a rich repository of information and insights regarding markets and consumption, which has an influence on the way companies and advertisers design their marketing strategy to create more interactive user engagement.4 As Henry Jenkins states, media consumers exert ‘a disproportionate influence on media culture’, because advertisers and media producers are eager to attract and hold the consumers attention.5 In addition, José van Dijck emphasizes that new digital platforms are giving rise to a profound paradigm shift in the way companies approach their customers and conduct business relations. She argues

1 Jin Kim, “The Institutionalization of YouTube: From User-Generated Content to Professionally Generated Content,” Media, Culture & Society 34, no. 1 (January 1, 2012): 53–67, https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443711427199. 2 Kim; Mikyoung Kim and Doori Song, “When Brand-Related UGC Induces Effectiveness on Social Media: The Role of Content Sponsorship and Content Type,” International Journal of Advertising 37, no. 1 (January 2, 2018): 105–24, https://doi.org/10.1080/02650487.2017.1349031; George Christodoulides, “Branding in the Post-Internet Era,” Marketing Theory 9, no. 1 (March 1, 2009): 141– 44, https://doi.org/10.1177/1470593108100071. 3 Meeyoung Cha et al., “Analyzing the Video Popularity Characteristics of Large-Scale User Generated Content Systems,” IEEE/ACM Trans. Netw. 17, no. 5 (October 2009): 1357–1370, https://doi.org/10.1109/TNET.2008.2011358. 4 Milad Dehghani et al., “Evaluating the Influence of YouTube Advertising for Attraction of Young Customers,” Computers in Human Behavior 59 (June 1, 2016): 165–72, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2016.01.037. 5 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (NYU Press, 2006), 23.

that UGC sites give users more power over content because consumers can add business value, which she attempts to comprehend using the concept of user agency.6 The application (app) called musical.ly (in this research referred to as Musical.ly) is a striking example of video content generated by users (called ‘Musers’) being utilized at times for broader marketing strategies.7 Musical.ly is a social network for creating, sharing, and discovering short 15-second music videos, and stands out in the way it integrates built-in editing features and a vertical recording perspective.8 These functions have resulted in the popularity of hand signs, which are used to perform lyrics of songs visually on the platform. This hand signing as form of creative expression makes it interesting to investigate in the way Musical.ly’s platform affordances enable new forms of content creation. Moreover, the increasing popularity of the app has resulted in a widespread (online) Musical.ly user community, which has made the platform an interesting target for companies to utilize these social connections and features for a so-called brand community. This, according to Jenkins, has the potential to expand customer loyalty and product engagement.9 It can be stated that the advent of user-generated video content, and platforms like Musical.ly that enable it, are reshaping the way media is being consumed, and UGC sites are creating new viewing patterns and social interactions, empowering users to become more creative.10 This raises questions about the authenticity and realization of content but also about the participatory elements these platforms allow for, which can be subject to larger marketing purposes.

6 José van Dijck, “Users like You? Theorizing Agency in User-Generated Content,” Media, Culture & Society 31, no. 1 (January 1, 2009): 42, https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443708098245. 7 Musical.ly Inc. Zhu, Alex,Yang, Lulu (2014, August) musical.ly . Mobile Video Sharing Application. Freeware. IOS, Android. Retrieved, February 2018 8 “About,” Musical.ly, accessed February 28, 2018, http://musical.lyapp.tumblr.com/about. 9 Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 80. 10 Cha et al., “Analyzing the Video Popularity Characteristics of Large-Scale User Generated Content Systems.”

1.2 Motivation and problem statement

The way user-generated video content is currently commercialized and utilized within popular mobile apps is urgently important to investigate, because it can harness and influence user behavior and consumption on a large scale. It therefore calls for a deeper understanding of the exploitation and impact of user agency on mobile applications, especially used among, in this case, a large group of teenagers. To examine how this is utilized, this thesis aims to better understand how Musical.ly, as a UGC online platform, allows for the harness of UGC and, via a case study, examines how it has been employed as a marketing tool in the current Web 2.0 media landscape. In doing this, I wish to acknowledge how the platform can be situated in the broader discussion of UGC and the way in which UGC is exploited for marketability. It is important to account for the roles users and platforms play in this hybrid media environment, particularly because the boundaries between commerce, content, and information are currently being redrawn.11 I elaborate on José van Dijck theorizing user agency as central concept, by which she states that a multidisciplinary approach towards this requires a model that accounts for users’ multiple roles, because hybrid concepts disregard users as objects of targeted advertising.12 To gain an effective scope, I specifically focus on a collaboration between The Coca Cola Company and Musical.ly, which I further elucidate in the next section. This helps to examine the development of user agency and its relationship to the commercialization of UGC facilitated by an online platform. The main research, then, is: What does the Share a Coke campaign on Musical.ly tell us about the utilization of user agency and the commercialization of UGC within a mobile application centered on the production of music-centric video content?

This is followed by several sub-questions, such as: how do the tools within Musical.ly allow and aid the creative expression of users, and how does its development relate to the concept of user agency and its limitations? Additionally, in what way do the affordances allow for larger companies to exploit

11 José van Dijck, “Users like You? Theorizing Agency in User-Generated Content,” 12 Ibid, 46.

UGC and a community of users for their own branding, and how is this part of today’s commercialization of Web 2.0 technology? I argue that the relationship between the Coca-Cola campaign and Musical.ly can be viewed as one example of today’s exploitation within UGC mobile applications. This means, on the one hand, that it gives users a sense of agency over their content and allows for participatory features. On the other hand, media producers and marketers have learned to co-opt the participatory characteristics for their own benefits.

1.3 Case study

Coca-Cola (The Coca-Cola Company) was one of the first global companies to utilize Musical.ly for marketing purposes. They did this as part of their worldwide Share a Coke campaign, in which they printed popular song lyrics on Coca- Cola bottles.13 In a promotion video, they stated that they attempted to use the concept of music as a 'universal language' to create an interactive context for their branding campaign. 14 To unfold this, they collaborated with Musical.ly, inviting Musers to upload creative videos integrating the Coca-Cola brand with the hashtag #ShareaCoke. This took the form of a competition to win a FaceTime conversation with Jason Derulo, a pop musician and Coca-Cola ambassador.15 The hashtag #ShareaCoke was mentioned in over 100.000 videos on the platform by which Coca-Cola received an incredible 953,000 video submissions on Musical.ly, altogether generating 134 million views, and #ShareaCoke became the top hashtag on Musical.ly.16 Thus, it is important to attempt to understand the implication of this campaign and associated hashtag facilitated by a popular social platform like Musical.ly. As this case study illustrated, a widespread brand

13 Shorty Awards, “Share a Coke: Turning Lyrics into Language - The Shorty Awards,” accessed February 22, 2018, http://shortyawards.com/9th/share-a-coke; “Share a Coke and a Song: Summer Campaign to Feature Music Lyrics on Packaging,” Share , accessed February 23, 2018, http://www.coca-colacompany.com/stories/share-a-coke-and-a-song-summer-campaign-to-feature- music-lyrics-on-packaging/. 14 U. M. Worldwide, Share a Coke, and a Song - Turning Language into Lyrics, 2017, accessed February 23,2018, https://vimeo.com/201306798. 15 “Musical.Ly Jason Derulo Contest for #ShareaCoke,” musical.ly, accessed March 2, 2018, http://musical.lyapp.tumblr.com/post/145666104914/musical.ly-jason-derulo-contest-for-shareacoke. 16 Shorty Awards, “Share a Coke.”

like Coca-Cola and the music industry are responding to the utilization of Musical.ly as a social content platform, and in collaboration, these companies attempt to market the creative production of UGC to lure user responses and create brand commitment. Relating to this research, it is important to understand the meaning of the development of online user engagement and the marketability of UGC, and how a platform like Musical.ly, with its specific features, allows for the commercialization of user agency relating to UGC. As José Van Dijck claims, it is important not to neglect the substantial role a site’s interface plays in maneuvering individual users and communities in order to understand the cultural complexity of a platform and its complicated relationship to user agency.17

1.4 Positioning

Researching the Coca-Cola case on Musical.ly builds on previous studies concerning the harnessing of online platforms as tools to steer user behavior and the commercialization of user-generated content on social media platforms. 18 Additionally, this thesis connects to discourses on UGC and the affordances that make UGC possible.19 That being said, this research also speaks to the debate concerning the exploitation of online platforms, in which UGC platforms are used as marketing tools to expand consumers’ emotional, social, and intellectual

17 Dijck, “Users like You?,” 54. 18 José van Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media (Oxford University Press, 2013); Jenkins, Convergence Culture; Tarleton Gillespie, “The Politics of ‘Platforms,’” New Media & Society 12, no. 3 (May 1, 2010): 347–64, https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444809342738; Anne Helmond and Tina Bucher, “The Affordances of Social Media Platforms,” accessed February 22, 2018, http://www.annehelmond.nl/2016/08/01/the-affordances-of-social-media-platforms/; Robert V. Kozinets, Andrea Hemetsberger, and Hope Jensen Schau, “The Wisdom of Consumer Crowds: Collective Innovation in the Age of Networked Marketing,” Journal of Macromarketing 28, no. 4 (December 1, 2008): 339–54, https://doi.org/10.1177/0276146708325382. 19 Jill Walker Rettberg, “Hand Signs for Lip-Syncing: The Emergence of a Gestural Language on Musical.Ly as a Video-Based Equivalent to Emoji,” Social Media + Society 3, no. 4 (October 1, 2017): 2056305117735751, https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305117735751; Pamela J. McKenzie et al., “User- Generated Online Content 1: Overview, Current State and Context,” First Monday 17, no. 6 (June 6, 2012), https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v17i6.3912; Andreas M. Kaplan and Michael Haenlein, “Users of the World, Unite! The Challenges and Opportunities of Social Media,” Business Horizons 53, no. 1 (January 2010): 59–68, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bushor.2009.09.003; Helmond and Bucher, “The Affordances of Social Media Platforms.”

investments, with the goal of shaping consumption patterns.20 Tarleton Gillespie states that media platforms are significant mediums of public discourse because of their large user bases and their dominance of the web.21 Furthermore, José van Dijck suggests that technical developments have the potential to create new layers through which people organize their social lives, which can influence human interaction, not only on an individual and community level, but also on a larger societal level. 22 Strikingly, there is a lack of scholarly research on Musical.ly and its UGC affordances, which helps to explain why investigation of this platform is urgently needed. However, there is some formal research by scholar Jill Walker Rettberg who has discussed the lip-syncing videos and hand gestures made on Musical.ly as visual representations that signify the creative performance of lyrics.23 She asserts that new technologies can affect gestural communication, which is fundamental to the development of human communication. The rapid development of tools and affordances within mobile applications thus urges for a closer look, as researching the specificity of the features within Musical.ly, and Musical.ly as a tool in itself, has not yet been researched. Analyzing this adjoins to the discussion about the specificity of these platforms as not merely neutral, but as hybrid socio-technological environments that, as Tina Bucher and Anne Helmond have demonstrated, draw different users together and orchestrate the relations between various platform makers and their consumers. 24 With this thesis, I aim to build on previous research that argues that it is important to devise new ways to assess content trends across these new production platforms, and join the debate about new business models arising from Web 2.0 culture and UGC as processes that can affect our understanding of media audience practices.25

20 Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity; James Hay and Nick Couldry, “Rethinking Convergence/Culture,” Cultural Studies 25, no. 4–5 (September 1, 2011): 473–86, https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2011.600527. 21 Gillespie, “The Politics of ‘Platforms.’” 22 Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity, 4. 23 Rettberg, “Hand Signs for Lip-Syncing.” 24 Helmond and Bucher, “The Affordances of Social Media Platforms.” 25 S. Elizabeth Bird, “Are We All Produsers Now?,” Cultural Studies 25, no. 4–5 (September 1, 2011): 502–16, https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2011.600532; Jing Wang, “New Media Technology and

2 Methodology

For the purpose of this research, I adopted a materialistic approach by utilizing an affordance analysis, investigating the Share a Coke campaign on Musical.ly as the primary object of study. Affordance analysis allows for the recognition of how specific practices and uses of the app negotiate with the features of a platform and, in doing so, are instrumental in shaping the data, or in this case content, being produced on platforms such as Musical.ly. 26 I therefore examined the editing, analytical, and sharing features the application offers by investigating the platform elements that allow for a company like Coca-Cola to harness this type of user-generated video content, but also briefly analyze the foundation of the Coca-Cola campaign to better understand its relationship towards Musical.ly. To this end, I focused on the interface and tagged information on Musical.ly, such as hashtags, but also examined a Creators Playbook made by Musical.ly, which is a document that explains to users how to most effectively build a Musical.ly account.27 This materialistic view of the Musical.ly case can be of value because, as Gillespie underlines, ‘platforms’ are ‘platforms’ not necessarily because they allow code to be written or run, but because they afford an opportunity to communicate, interact or sell. 28 Therefore, it is of interest to examine how Musical.ly as an object constrains user agency with the respect to the commercialization of UGC, specifically focusing on its features and affordances. I emphasize that I did not intend to explore the computational aspects, APIs, codes, or legal and governance implications from a material–technical perspective, among other things, because I did not have access to this data, which may be a limitation of this research.

New Business Models: Speculations on ‘Post-Advertising’ Paradigms,” Media International Australia 133, no. 1 (November 1, 2009): 110–19, https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878X0913300115. 26 Esther Weltevrede and Erik Borra, “Platform Affordances and Data Practices: The Value of Dispute on Wikipedia,” Big Data & Society 3, no. 1 (January 5, 2016): 2053951716653418, https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951716653418; Tim Ingold, “Materials against Materiality,” Archaeological Dialogues 14, no. 1 (June 2007): 1–16, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1380203807002127. 27 Ajay Shashi, “Musical.Ly Creator Playbook - Build Your Own Identity and Fandom,” Musical.ly Online - Get Featured and Crowned! (blog), November 30, 2017, https://howtomusical.ly.com/musical-ly-creator-playbook/.; “CreatorPlaybook.Pdf,” Musical.ly, accessed April 25, 2018, https://static.muscdn.com/website/pdf/creatorPlaybook.pdf. 28 Gillespie, “The Politics of ‘Platforms,’ 351.

Furthermore, to understand how users participated in the Musical.ly/Coca-Cola challenge and how this can be viewed as commercialization of UGC, I examined in detail two Musical.ly videos by utilizing textual analysis. Conducting textual analysis allowed me to comprehend what a Musical.ly video related to the Coca-Cola campaign contains, and to some extent, understand how it was created and edited. I chose two videos because analyzing additional Musical.ly videos from this campaign would be redundant, as most of the content is consistent and similar. To contextualize this, I elaborate on the examples of hand signs used in the Coca-Cola Musical.ly videos as so-called ‘gestural language’, as theorized by Jill Rettberg, to apprehend how user-generated creative performance can be harnessed or commercialized (which is further explained in the theoretical framework). According to scholar Bonnie Brennen, textual analysis allows for the ability to see media texts as cultural artefacts. She also emphasizes the effort to use textual analysis to understand some of the many connections between media, culture, and society. 29 Coming from journalism and media studies, scholar Elfriede Fursich argues that a limitation of textual analysis is that it does not focus on more comprehensive projects like semi-structured interviews and because it is interpretative it can lack depth, which critics like Greg Philo also emphasize.30 However, textual analysis allows for the study to make a distinction between media as a phenomenon separate from the rest of society, which is necessary for taking a step back to see which daily forms of consumption are being normalized. Related to media studies, examining two videos through textual analysis allows for an investigation into Musical.ly as an objective case that can reveal what kind of actions the features allow or limit. 31 Together, affordance and textual analysis combined allow me to investigate social implications that arise from tools that enable UGC to be commercialized. To critically review the commercialization of UGC, I further elaborate on theories concerning user agency, creative expression through digital communication, and the utilization of online brand communities.

29 Bonnie Brennen, Qualitative Research Methods for Media Studies (Taylor & Francis, 2017), 204. 30 Elfriede Fürsich, “In Defense of Textual Analysis,” Journalism & Media Studies 10, no. 2 (April 1, 2009): 238–52, https://doi.org/10.1080/14616700802374050. 31 Ibid.

3 Theoretical framework

3.1 User-generated video content and user agency

First, I briefly want to touch upon the concept of UGC, followed by theorizing user agency. The term UGC, or UCC (user-created content), which achieved broad popularity in 2005, is also described as the various forms of media content that are publicly available and created by end users. 32 The rise of UGC is characterized by increased participation and interaction of Internet users who use it to communicate and express themselves.33 Additionally, it may be argued that the establishment of screen media like YouTube has given rise to new viewing practices (for example, the concept of ‘connected viewing’) and is shaping a set of newly prominent online screen entertainment platforms, which facilitate user-generated video content. 34 Video platforms are becoming the most visited websites worldwide, acknowledged by, among others, Cisco’s Visual Networking Index, which tracks and forecasts the impact of visual networking applications. It predicts that by 2019 about 80% of Internet traffic will consist of video.35 Cunningham et al. argue that this new screen ecology is a space of unimagined scale and scope of dynamic online creativity and culture, which can also be turbulent and problematic for both creators and social networks, as it encapsulates deep changes in consumer habits.36 The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), in their rapport concerning UGC, state: “These new web tools are said to enable

32 Kaplan and Haenlein, “Users of the World, Unite! The Challenges and Opportunities of Social Media.” 33 Graham Vickery and Sacha Wunsch-Vincent, “Participative Web And User-Created Content: Web 2.0 Wikis and Social Networking” (Paris, France, France: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 2007); Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity. 34 Stuart Cunningham, David Craig, and Jon Silver, “YouTube, Multichannel Networks and the Accelerated Evolution of the New Screen Ecology,” Convergence 22, no. 4 (August 1, 2016): 376–91, https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856516641620. 35 Cisco VNI, “Cisco Visual Networking Index: Forecast and Methodology, 2016–2021,” accessed March 23, 2018, https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/service-provider/visual- networking-index-vni/complete-white-paper-c11-481360.html. 36 Cunningham, Craig, and Silver, “YouTube, Multichannel Networks and the Accelerated Evolution of the New Screen Ecology.”

commercial and non-commercial service providers to better harness the ‘collective intelligence’ of Internet users, using information and knowledge embedded in the Web in the form of data, metadata, user participation and creating links between these.” 37 To elucidate, this can have impact on, for example, the way users obtain information or gather knowledge, as UGC sites, according to the OECD, can be viewed as potentially influential mechanisms that provide citizens (such as students or other consumers) with information and knowledge.38 According to José van Dijck, UGC platforms empower individuals by enabling them to connect with their social network, express themselves, or belong to a community.39 It may be stated that, today this means more than just being connected with peers online, as often companies are trying to adjust advertising to users’ online interests, and online platform architectures are becoming engineered towards advertisement practices. In the article Users Like You? Theorizing agency in user-generated content, José van Dijck elaborates on the user’s role within the context of UGC.40 She states that the agency users seem to have on social media platforms is much more complex than popular terms like ‘prosumer’ or ’co-creator’ imply, by emphasizing users’ production capabilities.41 Van Dijck suggests that if we want to understand how socio-economic and technological transformations affect the current shake-up of power relationships between media companies, advertisers, and users, it is important to highlight user agency as multifaceted, accounting for technologies and site owners as actors who condition content and give users a sense of agency. She states that the concept of everyone being a creator is also the beginning of an era, by which UGC has started to be commercialized and user activity has become heavily mediated and steered by high-tech algorithmic platforms and datamining firms.42 José van Dijck’s critical perspective allows for a better understanding of the development and creation of UGC on Musical.ly and its editing features, as this thesis examines how the idea of the way users become their own ‘producers’ is not as neutral as it might sound. Therefore, user agency as a central concept

37 Vickery and Wunsch-Vincent, “Participative Web And User-Created Content,” 9. 38 Ibid. 39 Dijck, “Users like You?” 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid, 54.

for this thesis helps me to gain insight as to whether the utilization of technical features afforded on Musical.ly has the power to steer user content. The following sections briefly elaborate on other theories to substructure this research.

3.2 Digital communication as gestural language

To understand the concept of lip-syncing as a form of creative expression on Musical.ly, Jill Rettberg argues that the lip-syncing videos specifically made on Musical.ly constitute a “codified, non-verbal language of pictograms” that can be viewed as equivalent to the emoji’s found in text-based communication.43 Video recording on a vertical smartphone screen thus not only allows for new forms of creative expression, but also has the potential to develop into a new form of virtual language. Rettberg argues that as video and other visual forms of communication become more common online, we will continue to see how the human need for gestures leaks into digital communication. She states: “Until now, we have thought of emoji and other forms of non-standard punctuation that are used to enhance writing in digital media as being a way to add aspects of non- verbal speech that are necessary to conversation to a text-only medium.”44 These virtual hand signs thus have the ability to represent a concept, action, or emotion, which is interesting for large companies like Coca-Cola to respond to and direct to their advertising interests. This is a new interactive development that more traditional media, such as radio or television, do not always allow for. Hence, looking at the development of body language, using sign language for music is not a novel concept. Music performance scholars Fulford and Ginsborg state that humans used physical gestures to communicate before they even evolved the capacity for speech, but that humans still move their hands during speech today, as this enhances the quality of their communication with others.45 Musicians' gestures therefore often reflect rhythms, dynamics, climaxes, or pauses within the music itself and, while it may come naturally to singers to gesture while singing as though they were gesturing while talking, these

43 Rettberg, “Hand Signs for Lip-Syncing.” 44 Ibid, 9. 45 Robert Fulford and Jane Ginsborg, “The Sign Language of Music: Musical Shaping Gestures (MSGs) in Rehearsal Talk by Performers with Hearing Impairments,” Empirical Musicology Review 8, no. 1 (October 24, 2013): 53–67.

movements may also serve important social, communicative, and expressive functions in performance.46 For the aim of this thesis looking at the Musical.ly/Coca-Cola case, it is of interest to explore how the platform affords creative expression using music, lyrics, and communication in the form of hand signing, to assist the brand in increasing brand awareness. For example, we see this as, in its campaign, Coca- Cola invited users to play with hand signing and integrate Coca-Cola products in order to create content. This allows me to comprehend how users are stimulated or encouraged by the affordances to commercialize content by playing with product placement, and to better understand the relationship between the platform’s design, the Coca-Cola campaign, and Musers’ relationship with the two.

3.3 Exploitation of UGC, harnessing online brand communities

To comprehend the exploitation of UGC for this thesis, I wish to elaborate on theories concerning the harness of online user participation and online brand communities. In the article Loser Generated Content: From Participation to Exploitation, Søren Petersen emphasizes the counterintuitive aspects of Web 2.0. 47 Petersen states: “The Internet functions as a double–edged sword; the infrastructure does foster democracy, participation, joy, creativity and sometimes creates zones of piracy. But, at the same time, it has become evident how this same infrastructure also enables companies easily to piggyback on user- generated content.” 48 Here he tries to emphasize that, on the one hand, the Internet or so-called participative web is being promoted as countercultural and inherently democratic. But at the same time, through the distributed architecture of participation, companies can harness UGC by archiving data, designing user interfaces, or using other strategies such as integrated advertisement or product placement.49 Petersen states that one of the most interesting, yet problematic, aspects of Web 2.0 is the relational character of these technologies, which aims to

46 Robert Fulford and Jane Ginsborg, “The Sign Language of Music” 47 Søren Mørk Petersen, “Loser Generated Content: From Participation to Exploitation,” First Monday 13, no. 3 (2008), http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2141. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid.

create significance and value for users. He argues that this explains why a specific type of software and the practices related to it can be participatory and create pleasure for its users, but can simultaneously be exploitative. Petersen’s critical view allows me to analyze how Musical.ly’s participatory affordances enable the exploitation of user content and its contradictory aspects, and it provides a notion of its relational character towards the Coca-Cola campaign. Subsequently, in the article New Media Technology and New Business Models: Speculations on ‘post-advertising’ paradigms, scholar Jing Wang discusses the opening up for new modes of commercializing the internet, made possible by the advent of social media or so-called Web 2.0 technologies.50 She critically reviews the impact of open content technology on advertising and culture, UGC, and the industry buzz about emerging business models enabled by Web 2.0. Wang states that UGC is increasingly aggregated on the Internet and utilized for commercial purposes inconceivable to traditional advertisers and advertising agencies, and that it has become apparent that the open and participatory character of social networking platforms has rendered UGC vulnerable to commercial exploitation.51 For example, Wang illustrates that large companies are becoming involved with UGC because their millennial targets are ‘leapfrogging’ stages of technological development, and the most effective way for marketers to reach them is to engage as early as possible with new media platforms. This can be problematic, as today this means that global companies like Coca-Cola have the ability to be involved in an early stage of the development and use of social media platforms and their features, and platforms like Musical.ly are responding to this by integrating or adjusting their business models. In examining the Musical.ly/Coca-Cola campaign, it is important to investigate and attempt to understand how Musical.ly, as a social media platform allows for participatory engagement and highly social experiences, so that companies like Coca-Cola can exploit these elements for their own benefits. In his book Convergence Culture, media scholar Henry Jenkins tried to understand why marketers and companies seek to shape brand reputations through the total sum of interactions with the customer, which increasingly occur across a range of different media “touch points”, and how they try to create a

50 Wang, “New Media Technology and New Business Models.” 51 Ibid, 111.

long-term relationship between a consumer and a brand via online platforms.52 He emphasizes that marketing gurus state that building a committed online “brand community” via different media and platforms may be the surest means of expanding consumer loyalty. This is mainly because online participation sustains social connections over a longer period of time, and therefore intensifies the role these communities play in their purchasing decisions.53 The latter suggests that a strong social interaction between users on, for example Musical.ly, simultaneously makes Musical.ly an interesting platform for commercial practices to exploit its online user community, as this can provide valuable information for a company like Coca-Cola because of, in this case, its interactive and young user base. This can be problematic and thus urges for a deeper investigation into the relationship and the role of the user, the platform, and the product. Looking further at the impact of online brand communities, in the article The Wisdom of Consumer Crowds, Kozinets et al. investigate the gathering of online communities relating to Web 2.0, whose innovations are beginning to transform the world of marketing. 54 They conceptualize collective consumer creativity as something that can be lionized as a rich resource with the potential to be “exploited” and managed by business interests.55 Kozinets et al. state that this is mainly because online communities are qualitatively distinct from individual consumer creativity, as it is the case that “social interactions” trigger new interpretations and new discoveries that consumers “thinking alone, could not have generated”56 The role of online communities can be discussed as UGC is also often focused on individual content creation, the elevation of personal profiles and competition. Most importantly, however, utilizing online communities via an online platform as a rich resource for business interests is critical, as it allows for exploiting consumer interests and behavior. It is thus of interest to analyze the role that Musical.ly plays within the Coca-Cola campaign, and how it utilizes online user communities for branding purposes. Although Kozinets et al. and Jenkins may focus on marketing theory, I do

52 Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 63. 53 Ibid, 80. 54 Kozinets, Hemetsberger, and Schau, “The Wisdom of Consumer Crowds.” 55 Ibid, 340. 56 Ibid, 341.

not specifically analyze what type of communities participate in the Coca-Cola case on Musical.ly from a marketing perspective. As it is not the central argument of this thesis, I believe looking at this framework in a supportive sense allows me to examine the relationship of Musical.ly as a social platform within the scope of Coca-Cola’s larger branding campaign.

4 Analysis

4.1 Musical.ly, ‘the MTV for generation Z’

Founded in 2014 by Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang, Musical.ly began as an educational app with instructional videos recorded by experts in a variety of fields. This, however did not gain much popularity. In response, Zhu and Yang combined music and social media, which resulted in a successful application with over 200 million active users worldwide and around 10 million videos being created daily. With an increasing popularity in a relatively short time span it experienced faster growth than Facebook and Twitter in its first years. 57 On its official website, Musical.ly is described as:

An entertainment social network for creating, sharing and discovering short videos. Every day, millions of people use musical.ly as an outlet to express themselves through singing, dancing, sports, beauty & style, comedy and lip-syncing. We encourage our users to live with passion and use the app for creative expression by uploading videos and sharing them with others. 58

Scholar Jill Rettberg argues that people have listened to and performed the music they love for generations, but what an app like Musical.ly offers is the scale at which users are able to share their performances and the velocity to record and

57 Natalie Robehemed, “Musical.Ly Launches Video Series With Viacom, NBCUniversal And Hearst,” 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/natalierobehmed/2017/06/15/musical-ly-launches-video-series- with-viacom-nbcuniversal-and-hearst/#67e69d23b2bd. 58 “For Parents,” Support (blog), Musical.ly, accessed March 4, 2018, https://support.musical.ly/knowledge-base/for-parents/.

edit their performances far more easily than younger generations.59 For example, Musical.ly has integrated commercial Top 40 music and has collaborations with popular pop artists such as Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez, and Jason Derulo. Comparing this to similar social networks like Instagram or Snapchat, Musical.ly stands out by focusing specifically on musical performance among a young population, which may partially explain why the application has gained popularity among teenagers, as most of Musical.ly’s users are between 13 and 21 years old.60 It can be stated that Musical.ly has utilized the popularity of musical performance among teenagers to build a successful application, and that the platform owners, in their description on the website, want to give the impression that Musical.ly responds to the ‘open’ and ‘participatory’ characteristics of Web 2.0 technology. However, Musical.ly is built on the centralized structure of the so- called ‘walled-garden’ model, in which a user must create an account to have access to the platform, but his or her social data stay encapsulated within the platform. Thus, the user’s content is aggregated in a walled-in manner that, according to Jill Wang, stands opposed to open communication, which consequently has the ability to cause privacy issues within Musical.ly’s young target group.61 Further examining Musical.ly’s functionalities, the platform allows users to playback, record, edit, and distribute 15-second videos. Recently, Musical.ly has enabled ‘long videos’ up to 5 minutes, but the default for shooting a video remains at 15 seconds.62 Interestingly, it may be stated that Musical.ly set 15 seconds as a default for its content creation because this allows enough time for a user to create interactive content and engage, for example, with details of a pop song or develop a small chorus or loop, but it is not so long that peer users get bored watching. The 15 seconds also allows a user to create a catchy recording and to play with the dynamics of the video editing features that Musical.ly provides. Linking this 15 second default feature to José van Dijck’s theory, she argues that some degree of standardization is important to facilitate connectedness, and that algorithmic steering works better if the input is

59 Rettberg, “Hand Signs for Lip-Syncing.” 60 Robehemed, “Musical.Ly Launches Video Series With Viacom, NBCUniversal And Hearst.” 61 Wang, “New Media Technology and New Business Models.” 62 “Upload a Video Longer than 15 Seconds,” Support (blog), Musical.ly, accessed April 18, 2018, https://support.musical.ly/knowledge-base/upload-a-video-longer-than-15-seconds/.

uniform.63 Musical.ly thus steers its user behavior and creative content creation by standardizing 15-second loop videos, which forces users to fit their content within these few seconds. For a global company like Coca-Cola, Musical.ly’s 15- second recording loop is interesting to respond to, as the platform can serve as a marketing tool or allow for the creation of a catchy marketing jingle. Furthermore, Musical.ly’s interface is developed specifically for mobile phones and is not available from a web browser; thus users are compelled to create vertical phone-ratio content. Musical.ly’s Creator Playbook advises users to “Be sure to film in 1080 x 1920 px. Vertical videos outperform all other video dimensions on musical.ly.” and “Make sure your subject is in the vertical frame.”64 This is different from social media platforms like Instagram, which, for example, is focused on square-shaped images. Studies regarding the effects of screen size indicate that both information structure and screen size significantly affect the navigation behavior and perceptions of mobile Internet users.65 It can be stated that this phone ratio interface on Musical.ly allows for or limits particular modes of expression and interaction. For example, the vertical interface on Musical.ly encourages vertical hand signing. Jill Rettberg states that the hand signs on Musical.ly develop into a form of ‘gestural language’ that is understood and used by Musers, and that they are used to perform the lyrics of songs visually. Rettberg argues that this can be seen as a performative element of today’s online communication, which can function as a way of shaping conversations. 66 It can be argued that the interface of Musical.ly encourages users to shoot vertically, which results in a form of universal language. As such, the hand gestures and vertical performances on Musical.ly can serve as a means of communication, without spoken language, within the user community. For example, the expression ‘love’ is performed by forming the shape of a half heart with the fingers and thumb of one hand, so that the other hand remains free for holding the phone.67

63 Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity, 2013, 46. 64 “CreatorPlaybook.Pdf,” Musical.ly, https://static.muscdn.com/website/pdf/creatorPlaybook.pdf. 65 Minhee Chae and Jinwoo Kim, “Do Size and Structure Matter to Mobile Users? An Empirical Study of the Effects of Screen Size, Information Structure, and Task Complexity on User Activities with Standard Web Phones,” Behaviour & Information Technology 23, no. 3 (May 1, 2004): 165–81, https://doi.org/10.1080/01449290410001669923. 66 Rettberg, “Hand Signs for Lip-Syncing.” 67 Ibid.

In relation to Gibbs et al.’s theory, the hand signing on Musical.ly can also be constituted as a form of ‘platform vernacular’, which means that each social media platform comes to have its own unique combination of styles, grammars, and logics. Gibbs et al. state that several genres of communication can emerge from the affordances of particular social media platforms. The ways that they are appropriated and performed in practice simultaneously delimit modes of expression or action, which prioritizes social participation. 68 On Musical.ly’s interface, for example, creating content via hand signs can be utilized as a platform-specific language to express or imitate music lyrics as users try to utilize a relatively small phone screen and 15 seconds as effectively as possible. For example, the ‘love’ hand sign is specifically constituted and used within Musical.ly. In relation to music, using hand signs or body language can be viewed as a prominent form of expression within music or music videos. It may be stated that the vertical phone ratio frame on Musical.ly has been deliberately designed or integrated by the Musical.ly owners as a participatory and connecting element, which allows for the conditioning of users’ watching or uploading behavior in the form of hand signing, which has evolved through the users within the community. Further examining its interface design, the home screen defaults to a Musical.ly video, often the most popular video of that particular day, followed by featured videos when scrolling down. On the home screen the tabs ‘following’ and ‘for you’ are displayed, linking to videos from followed users or videos personally recommended by the app (Figure 1). The Musical.ly videos are divided into 12 different categories: live, comedy, style, food, animals, talent, sports, vlog, gaming, visual art, music, and DIY/how. It may be stated that Musical.ly designed these categories because they allow or steer users into creating content that fits within said categories, which makes it easier for the platform owners to filter or control content creation. For example, when a user creates content related to ‘food’, it allows Musical.ly to filter this specific content that fits within the broader framework of categories provided. Interestingly, most of the Musical.ly videos are categorized by the use of hashtags, for example: #snapyourlife, #springlookbook, #pickitupchallenge (Figures 2 and 3). Hashtags play a valuable role on Musical.ly, as users are able

68 Martin Gibbs et al., “#Funeral and Instagram: Death, Social Media, and Platform Vernacular,” Information, Communication & Society 18, no. 3 (March 4, 2015): 255–68, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2014.987152.

to search videos via hashtags, which also enhances the popularity or visibility of videos. Relating this use of hashtags to theory by media scholars Axel Bruns and Jean Burgess, they state that the hashtag stands as a paradigmatic example of a form of expression that can be established through widespread community use and adaptation.69 In addition, scholars Ruth Page and Evandro Cunha et al. state that using a hashtag can be viewed as conversational in and of itself, which is not only a resource for promoting visibility but also to create communities of people interested in the same topic by making it easier for them to find and share information related to it.70 Relating this to Musical.ly, for instance, the hashtag ‘#BoomFlossChallenge’ is an interesting example in which the user community responded to this hashtag by challenging each other with a specific dance; here, the hashtag served as a ‘communication tag’ in the captions of users. Similarly, the hashtag #ShareaCoke has played a significant or even leading role in the Musical.ly/Coca-Cola challenge, as it has allowed users to create videos as part of a wider ‘hashtag’- conversation. To elucidate, Musers posted the #ShareaCoke tag under their Musical.ly videos, and clicking this hashtag has led to more content discovery of other videos with the #ShareaCoke caption. Regarding the theory from Bruns and Brugess, this hashtag can be analyzed as an exemplification that underlines the implication of using a thematic hashtag, as an explicit attempt to address an imagined community of users who are following and discussing a specific topic.71 The use of the #ShareaCoke hashtag is therefore a useful example that shows how a specific feature within Musical.ly leads to more user interaction and brand exposure for Coca-Cola.

69 Axel Bruns and Jean E. Burgess, “The Use of Twitter Hashtags in the Formation of Ad Hoc Publics,” in Proceedings of the 6th European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) General Conference 2011 (6th European Consortium for Political Research General Conference, University of Iceland, Reykjavik, 2011), http://www.ecprnet.eu/conferences/general_conference/reykjavik/. 70 Ruth Page, “The Linguistics of Self-Branding and Micro-Celebrity in Twitter: The Role of Hashtags - Ruth Page, 2012,” accessed March 22, 2018, http://journals.sagepub.com.proxy.library.uu.nl/doi/abs/10.1177/1750481312437441; Evandro Cunha et al., “Analyzing the Dynamic Evolution of Hashtags on Twitter: A Language-Based Approach,” in Proceedings of the Workshop on Languages in Social Media, LSM ’11 (Stroudsburg, PA, USA: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2011), 58–65, http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2021109.2021117. 71 Bruns and Burgess, “The Use of Twitter Hashtags in the Formation of Ad Hoc Publics.”

Figure 1. Home-Screen Musical.ly Figure 2. Search function and Figure 3. Examples hashtags categories

4.2 The edit process: creating a Musical.ly

In analyzing an individual Musical.ly video, as seen above, the video page displays the muser’s username, a caption, and the name of the song and artist. Here, I discuss a video made by Baby Ariel (Ariel Martin), one of the biggest ‘Musical.ly influencers’, with 26.5 million followers, who participated in the Coca- Cola campaign. Examining the video she made for Coca-Cola, displayed on the right side is how many ‘hearts’ (similar to ‘likes’) the video has had thus far (14,463). In addition, a peer user can comment or explore her profile (Figure 4). She also has a ‘crown emoticon’ on her profile, which indicates that she is a verified user, or ‘top performer’, on the platform (Figure 5). Musical.ly describes this as a “crowned user, which represents the concept of great users on musical.ly.”72 This is explained on Musical.ly’s ‘branding’ page, which indicates that ‘crowned’ or ‘featured’ users can possibly be utilized as interesting advertising targets. Relating this to José van Dijck’s theory, it can be said that, for example, the ‘crowned’ tag serves as a new form of user status, which prompts further critical assessment of user agency, because a Musical.ly user with this tag

72 “Musical.Ly,” Musical.ly, accessed April 24, 2018, https://www.musical.ly/en-US/branding#elements.

is labelled as an influential user and therefore can become an object of targeted advertising.73 In the Musical.ly/Coca-Cola campaign, it seems as though Baby Ariel is targeted as a ‘crowned user’, to join in the competition. This is visible in her caption by the hashtags #ad (advertising) or #spon (sponsorship) (Figure 4). Because of her large fan base, she is an interesting user for Coca-Cola and Musical.ly to spotlight during a commercial campaign, as many teenaged users will follow her lead, which gives Baby Ariel a sense of agency or empowerment. Proceeding to create a Musical.ly video from scratch, there is an ‘addition’ symbol in the bottom center of the screen, which allows a user to shoot a video (front or rear camera) and to choose a song from the Musical.ly library (music that the app provides) or upload one’s own sound. Unique about Musical.ly, compared to other social media networks, is how the app allows a user to choose between different time lapses to record a video, i.e., Epic, Slow, Norm, Fast, and Lapse, and the way it enables a user to combine these different video edits. For example, a user may make the first few seconds slow and the other half an ‘epic’ motion, which allows the user to play with these stop motion editing features and allows for further creativity (Figure 6). According to Rettberg, users have become increasingly accustomed to playing with these functions within touch screens as ‘new modalities’, or cultural practices, like the Musical.ly hand signs.74 The slow- motion function allows one to slowly record the lyrics of the song, and thus enables creation of hand gestures. Examining the editing features, these functions allow a user to play with particular modes of expression and interaction, which differs from, for example, Instagram or YouTube. Additionally, a user is able to cut the music according to his or her preferences, adjusting the music via a so-called ‘mixer’, ‘move & trim’ function, or ‘sound fx’. Next, a user can insert filters, stickers or emoticons, and once again adjust the time lapse with different motion filters such as Ripple, Vibration, Reverse and Time Trap (Figure 7). This can be compared to, for example, the function of a PowerPoint slideshow or transitions for digital video editing, in which a user is able to insert different transitions between the slides. At last, Musical.ly allows a user to add information such as a caption or thumbnail, and offers possibilities to share the video via other platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter (Figure 8).

73 Dijck, “Users like You?” 74 Rettberg, “Hand Signs for Lip-Syncing.”

Looking at other large video platforms, such as YouTube, Snapchat, or Instagram, it may be argued that Musical.ly is similar, but combines social features with 15-second video editing features to allow users to produce short content on the platform and stimulate the creation of UGC by using themes and inviting users to challenge each other through duet functionalities. This not only makes Musical.ly an interesting platform for advertisers or marketers to exploit, but it also gives users a sense of agency over the creation of their video content, as they can record, perform, and edit the process themselves. Worth noting is that the term UGC gives the sense that ‘everyone’ can be a creator, and Musical.ly responds to this by promoting their platform as ‘creative outlet’. Scholar Jing Wang argues that “With a smartphone in hand, everyone has the potential to become an amateur media producer without having to master professional video tools.”75. However, making and editing a Musical.ly video is not as easy as it seems; in fact, it is quite challenging. To elucidate, this has resulted in almost four million YouTube community videos on “How To Musical.ly.” 76 Relating this to José van Dijck’s theory of user agency, it is problematic to presume that the availability of digital networked technologies transforms everyone into active participants. 77 The way Musical.ly offers a path towards ‘easy content creation’ is therefore ambiguous, as the features allow for participatory behavior relating to Web 2.0 technology, but at the same time this ‘open’ character can be exploited for broader marketing purposes. The following section further elaborates on this.

75 Wang, “New Media Technology and New Business Models.” 76 “How To Musical.ly,” YouTube, accessed May 17, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=how+to+musical.ly. 77 Dijck, “Users like You?”

Figure 4. Baby Ariel Coca-Cola Figure 5. Personal profile, crown Figure 6. Recording options Musical.ly badge Baby Ariel

Figure 7. Transition options

Figure 8. Thumbnail, caption or sharing features

4.3 Share a Coke and a Song: Turning Lyrics into Language

To elucidate the Share a Coke competition and situate Musical.ly in its broader scope, here I briefly explain the foundation of the Share a Coke and a Song campaign. The Share a Coke campaign on Musical.ly only lasted for a relatively short period of 15 days (June 9th through June 26th, 2016), but resulted in two million engagements, which added up to a 28% engagement rate and received, among others, a Shorty Award for Best Influencer, Celebrity Musical.ly Campaign.78 Initially, the Share a Coke and a Song campaign was a continuation of the Share a Coke marketing campaign from Coca-Cola, which kick-started in 2014. In 2016, Coca-Cola started to print popular song lyrics on their bottles and cans, instead of personalized names, to revive the initial Share a Coke campaign.79 Coca-Cola’s vice president Racquel Harris Mason stated, “Evolving the program to focus on lyrics creates an amazing opportunity for people to share special moments, sentiments and a Coca-Cola with people they care about.” 80 Additionally, Joe Belliotti, Coca-Cola’s head of global music marketing, mentioned:

Music is a universal language. Lyrics can explain how we feel and what we want to say when we cannot find the words ourselves. The art of sharing music to express feelings for someone special goes back to creating mixtapes as a kid, that behavior has not changed. We wanted to find a way to take this idea to 'Share a Coke'.81

According to Rettberg music audiences, especially young teenagers, have always responded to music they enjoy in a bodily way, and it is no surprise that a global platform like Musical.ly would turn out to be hugely popular among this population.82 Presumably, this was a deliberate marketing approach from Coca-

78 Andrew, “Musical.Ly Influencers Are Perfect for Targeting Generation Z,” PMYB (blog), March 8, 2018, https://pmyb.co.uk/musical-ly-influencers-perfect-targeting-generation-z/. 79 The Coca-Cola Company, “Share a Coke and a Song” 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid. 82 Rettberg, “Hand Signs for Lip-Syncing.”

Cola to utilize Musical.ly in an attempt to make Coca-Cola a part of youth’s social music conversations. Because tweens and teens like to engage with and express themselves through musical performances, and they enjoy sharing this with their peers, Musical.ly provided the ideal platform for Coca-Cola. As stated previously, the interaction with a young target group can elicit discussion, as this group tends to be more vulnerable regarding privacy issues, group pressure, or trending influences. It can thus be problematic when a large brand such as Coca-Cola (not a healthy lifestyle product) attempts to engage with teens via a social medium to sell their product. Relating the Coca-Cola content created by Musers to the theory of user agency, it seems that the boundaries between content provider and content consumer are being blurred, and that the idea of consumers-as-producers is being exploited by Coca-Cola. According to Wang’s theory, it is no longer the principle that advertisers ‘discipline’ the consumer, but rather, they put him or her at the steering wheel, and the ‘millennial generation’ is the largest consumer base for UGC. 83 Empowering a Musical.ly user to create content for a brand sounds, in a sense, progressive and as though they are taking the consumer’s opinion into consideration, but it also can be problematic, as users might not be aware of to what extent they are being influenced or exploited.

Figure 9. #ShareaCoke videos on Musical.ly

83 Wang, “New Media Technology and New Business Models.”

4.4 Musical.ly UGC and #ShareaCoke

#ShareaCoke for a change to FaceTime with @JasonDerulo. Create your best musical.ly to Jason Derulo’s RIDIN’ SOLO, Flo Rida’s I DON’T LIKE IT I LOVE IT, or TASE THE FEELING by Avicii vc. Conrad Sewell and tag it #ShareaCoke.84

The above is displayed when a user searches for the hashtag ‘#ShareaCoke’ on Musical.ly, and is followed by a link to the rules to participate in the contest (Figure 9). 85 These terms and conditions, among others, indicate that the Musical.ly videos participating in the contest cannot feature brand names or trademarks other than those owned by The Coca-Cola Company, and that a user must use a song associated with the contest.86 To illustrate how a user joined the competition and attempted to play with the Coca-Cola brand by making a Musical.ly video, I analyze a video made by @maxandharveyofficial. Max and Harvey Mills are brothers with over 5 million followers on Musical.ly, and this video has gained approximately 170,000 likes on the platform. The video is performed on the song “I don’t like it, I love it – from Flo Rida”. When opening the video, a viewer initially does not know who the individuals are. It shows a young man receiving a Coca-Cola can from an individual off-screen. The person on-screen starts playing with the can, lip- syncing to the lyrics “I’ve got to got to have it, oh oh’ (Figure 10). This part is the chorus of the song, and it thus can be considered the catchiest part to perform to. The video shows a form of upper body-only choreography paired with lip-syncing. After a few seconds, the young man moves the can towards the top of the screen, while another hand and a second can are simultaneously visible on the bottom, switching the initial can, made possible through a pausing effect on the platform, which allows for emulation of a magician effect (Figure 10). In the Creator Playbook, this is also described as stop-motion technology. It is stated that

84 Musical.ly “Musical.Ly Jason Derulo Contest for #ShareaCoke.” 85 Ibid. 86 Ibid.

“Editing is the secret weapon that top Musers use to elevate their content. Taking the time to perfect your video can make all the difference.”87 To elucidate, the individual holds the Coca-Cola can into the camera so tht the rest is blacked out, showing up afterwards in different clothing. This shot emphasizes the Coca-Cola brand by focusing on the label. On Musical.ly, this way of editing is called a ‘transition’, by which a user can stop during filming and resume when preferred, so the user is able to create different transitions or playback on the lyrics. Following this transition, the individual proceeds to dance and lip-sync to the Flo Rida song. Then he looks at his can and visually duplicates it, now holding two cans in his hands (Figure 10). It is not possible to record this with a continuous-film lens, but the affordances of Musical.ly allow a user to duplicate props, or even the users themselves, through the copying, pasting, and blurring functionalities. Finally, the individual makes a signal to his right, to share the second Coke with his (twin) brother, who now appears in front of the camera, and they end by drinking the Cokes together. This is a surprise effect because it initially appeared as though the first young man changed his outfit, but it ended up being his twin brother (Figure 10). Max and Harvey, in this example, used the tools available within Musical.ly in order to create a dynamic 15-second video. They used the 15 seconds to create four different transitions on the rhythm and chorus of the song and integrated the #duplicatechallenge (a challenging way of editing in which a prop, in this case the Coca-Cola can, is duplicated). In this case, the can is used for making the transition, which simultaneously results in significant emphasis of the Coca-Cola brand. The Musical.ly affordances allow users to play with a prop, but they also have the ability to change the relationship between a user and a brand or product, as it is not ‘just’ a can of Coca-Cola anymore, but is rather used to perform or edit with. Interestingly, the affordances allowed Max and Harvey to create creative brand advertising or product placement, and in a sense, establish a 15-second commercial on the popular jingle of a commercial song for Coca-Cola.

87 Musical.ly, “CreatorPlaybook.Pdf.”

Figure 10. Musical.ly/Coca-Cola video with hand gestures and transition effects @maxandharveyofficial

4.5 Utilizing Musical.ly as brand community

“Today the very proposition of the app is not about creating music videos. It's not about lip-syncing. It's about a social network," Zhu said. "It's a community. People want to stay because there are other people” (Alex Zhu, May 28th 2016, in Business Insider).88

From the above statement, it seems as though the platform owners target Musical.ly’s community elements as one of the main pillars of the platform. According to Jenkins, ‘online brand communities’ can provide long-term social structure to the relationship between marketers and consumers, and therefore are able to intensify the role a community plays in purchasing decisions. 89 Relating to Musical.ly, it can be stated that its strong user community, aside from the young target group and music elements discussed earlier, is one of the main reasons a large company like Coca-Cola wanted to collaborate with Musical.ly. In an interview with Business Insider, Musical.ly CEO Alex Zhu stated that they took the time to build every feature of the app around the creation of community. Zhu emphasized that they wanted to create a strong social network that is “built around the creation of videos, instead of having lip-syncing videos as a core

88 Biz Carson, “The inside Story of Musical.Ly - Business Insider,” Business Insider, accessed May 15, 2018, http://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-musical.ly-2016-5?international=true&r=US&IR=T. 89 Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 79.

business”90 For example, they integrated community features like a BFF feature – ‘Best Fans Forever’ – allowing Musers to create duets together, which can provoke a feeling of social connection between users (Figure 11). Furthermore, Musical.ly’s followers are called ‘fans’, rather than the ‘followers’ on, for instance, Instagram or Facebook. These community features can become interesting marketing tools, as they can create feelings of connectedness. Kozinets et al. state that being engaged in passionate work with a group of supportive (virtual) others brings back some of the intimate feelings enjoyed in childhood, being deeply immersed in play: intimacy with ourselves and our capacities, alongside closeness with friends to share our passions.91 The strong user community may be one of the reasons Coca-Cola wanted to integrate Musical.ly as part of their branding campaign, as the affordances allow for social interaction and the creation of creative content with the brand. Further analyzing Musical.ly’s Creator Playbook, it seems Musical.ly is focused on creating a stronger community by aspiring users into “building their own fan club” to get more followers/fans, and is encouraging Musers to connect through trending hashtags. Petersen states that, according to Web 2.0, it is the relationship between different digital elements that can create significance and value for users, and that this explains why a specific type of software and practices related to it can be participatory, exploitative, and create pleasure for its users, all at the same time.92 He explains that the communities that emerge, the integration of social networking in everyday life, and the personal biography a user creates through its content, comments, etc., can foster impressively strong ties to a particular site.93 Analyzing Musical.ly as part of Coca-Cola’s Share a Coke marketing campaign, it can be stated that Musical.ly’s target group and community of young teenagers can provide interesting insight into consumer interests, and that the creativity of the platform opens up ways for Coca-Cola to create interaction with this young population for larger marketing purposes, as demonstrated in the videos, for example, using the Coca-Cola can as a prop to create content. Relating this to the theory of brand communities, Kozinets et al. state that subcultures or

90 Carson, “The inside Story of Musical.Ly - Business Insider.” 91 Kozinets, Hemetsberger, and Schau, “The Wisdom of Consumer Crowds.” 92 Petersen, “Loser Generated Content.” 93 Ibid.

communities blend personal interests into hobbies and consumption activities, which are often profoundly intertwined with the marketing and consumption concerns of commercial marketplace culture. Additionally, the creative activity of these online communities is overlapping, and in many ways identical, to the types of consumption collectivities that marketers and consumer researchers are interested in.94 Marketing scholars even state that brand communities have the ability to create fully consumer-controlled markets.95 In the Musical.ly/Coca-Cola case, it seems Coca-Cola tried to play a forcing role and steered the Musical.ly community infrastructure during the campaign, by, among other things, using the #ShareaCoke tag, inviting Musical.ly influencers like Baby Ariel, Max and Harvey, and Jason Derulo to be brand ambassadors, integrating a set of songs, and persuading users to play with the Coca-Cola brand. Linking this to development within UGC and Web 2.0, Wang argues that, on the surface, it seems as though Web 2.0 broke down some of the traditional barriers between media companies and users, but that in the end corporate clients are still advertising towards consumer targets that remain passive, even though the users are actively creating content “with an assigned theme, and at the advertiser’s bidding.” 96 Although it seems that Musical.ly is offering novel and participatory features that open up creative ways for teens to express themselves, the development of the platform changes the way content is being created and the way in which consumers are being targeted.

94 Kozinets, Hemetsberger, and Schau, “The Wisdom of Consumer Crowds.” 95 Lauren I. Labrecque et al., “Consumer Power: Evolution in the Digital Age,” Journal of Interactive Marketing, Social Media and Marketing, 27, no. 4 (November 1, 2013): 257–69, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intmar.2013.09.002. 96 Wang, “New Media Technology and New Business Models”, 115

Figure 11. Duet function on Musical.ly

5 Conclusion

This thesis aimed to acknowledge how Musical.ly, as a popular social video network for teens, allows for the utilization and harness of UGC by The Coca- Cola Company, and how this case can be situated in the broader scope of UGC and its marketability within Web 2.0 technology. The leading question was, therefore, What does the Share a Coke campaign on Musical.ly tell us about the utilization of user agency and the commercialization of UGC within a mobile application centered on the production of music-centric video content? For an effective scope, the research was conducted by combining affordance and textual analysis, focused on the Coca-Cola campaign on Musical.ly as a case study. Assumingly, advertisers are responding to social media developments and new screen technology, with the purpose of creating stronger consumer ties. Consequently, as the analysis has shown, a social media platform like Musical.ly has responded to this by developing technological features that stimulate or empower users to create their own content, instead of the more traditional marketing model, in which content is mostly professionally created by marketers. Looking at Musical.ly’s affordances, the platform designed a vertical- screen recording and uploading interface responding to a smartphone, to make its usability and navigation for users as appealing and easy as possible. This vertical screen has enabled users to perform and aid creative expression via upper body language and hand signs. This hand signing on Musical.ly has created a form of language unique to the platform, described by researchers as a ‘platform vernacular’. Interestingly, this hand signing as a means of expression has aided in the creation of a strong and interactive community of users, which was harnessed by Coca-Cola to create a successful marketing campaign. The video by Max and Harvey outlined, for instance, that this hand signing allowed for the use of a Coca-Cola can to create dynamic video content, but at the same time the users were, in doing so, creating advertising through product placement for Coca- Cola. Furthermore, the platform designed functionalities by which users can create more dynamic video content through the utilization of in-app functions, such as filters, a ‘looping’ functionality, stop-motion, blurring options, and a variety of transitions and sharing options. Most notably, the platform allows users to create 15-second videos. It can be concluded that this has enabled

Musical.ly users to create catchy and transmittable content for their peer users. Moreover, this parallels the formulation of pop music, as a catchy loop is often 15 seconds long or a segment of a chorus. Analysis has also shown that these 15 seconds have become an interesting target for Coca-Cola to utilize this short type of content for their own marketing purposes. It may be said that 15 seconds of video can generate more user engagement, as this form of video content is short and straightforward, which seems to be ideal for a marketing jingle or tagline. Additionally, Musical.ly allows for the use of hashtags and categories to navigate the platform, which plays a significant role in user interaction and content creation. Coca-Cola utilized the #ShareaCoke tag to elevate their marketing campaign on the platform and to increase visibility. Moreover, the subcategories on Musical.ly steer user content by classifying themes that lead users to create content related to these themes. This empowers the platform to add or extract categories, by which it can condition user behavior. Looking at user agency, this thesis indicates that the idea of users obtaining more agency as a result of the open and transparent features of Web 2.0 is an allurement. It outlines that Musical.ly allows for creative expression via its features and gives users agency to create their own piece of content. At the same time, this approach to user content has been harnessed by Coca-Cola to create brand awareness among a young population. Musical.ly enabled Coca-Cola to use the platform’s social media features to create interactive user engagement, instead of more traditional forms of advertising, which emphasizes the proliferation of Web 2.0 technology and the associated rise of new business models. It can be concluded that Musical.ly’s young audience makes the platform an appealing marketing tool for advertisers seeking youngsters who do not watch television or listen to the radio. Presently, there is much buzz around emerging business models enabled by Web 2.0 technology and the speed at which social media platforms are changing and developing consumer markets. This thesis has demonstrated that from an individual consumer perspective, joining a social media platform like Musical.ly appears to the user to be primarily social and offers an attractive route for creative expression and the ability to share content with peers. Musical.ly enables additional ways to play with social content using video-editing features, which is different from platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, or YouTube. Simultaneously, it shows that these features have opened up ways for marketers

to harness the creative and social aspects of the platform in designing new business models for their own benefit. Looking at this from a broader perspective, this not only allows for companies to harness young users, but also has the potential to influence other forms of user behavior on a larger community level or, eventually, even on a global level. The relationship innate to UGC content creation between companies and consumers is being blurred. As connections between UGC content and commercial companies evolve, more research into the harnessing of UGC platforms for advertising must be further studied. Researching the Musical.ly/Coca-Cola collaboration and its relationship to the commercialization of online UGC has shown that it is critically important to examine new content platforms and trends. These relationships are changing how (young) users are engaging with both social platforms and commercial brands. This thesis has adjoined the discussion about social network platforms providing, not neutral spaces, but often much more walled-in and hybrid social- technological media spaces that orchestrate the relations between platform owners, large global companies, and their consumers, and subsequently, this elucidates that these relationships are perhaps not as participatory as they might appear to be.

Further research

A limitation of this research is that, due to the scope and time limit, I was not able to conduct extended research towards a deeper understanding of the motivations of the end-users themselves. It would be interesting to obtain a more detailed understanding of for what reasons users decided to participate in the Musical.ly/Coca-Cola competition, and in what way and for what purposes they use the application. For further research, it would be interesting to investigate this to deepen the understanding of the impact of such a large Musical.ly campaign. In future research, it would be helpful to conduct semi-structured interviews or ethnographic methods that further examine the Musical.ly- community. Furthermore, I had restricted access to the application by only having the opportunity to create a free user account and to analyze the content and affordances from a user’s perspective. Because of this, I was not able to investigate how Musical.ly is built, to see which APIs are involved, or how the

algorithm works. I also did not have access to the terms and agreements Musical.ly has with larger stakeholders such as Coca-Cola. A further investigation into the Musical.ly vision, and interviewing Musical.ly employees to get a better understanding of these relationships referring to marketing and advertising, might garner interesting results. Also, because this research was limited to one platform and one case, it would be interesting for further research to conduct a comparative analysis to see how UGC is commercialized and utilized on other platforms. Still, this research has shown that examining this one Coca-Cola case on Musical.ly has allowed me to get an idea of how online UGC offers global companies the ability to harness user content and, as such, this research has provided a deeper understanding of the emerging and complex developments that are part of commercial new media audience exploitation practices.

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