Mobile marketing Nicholas Carah Cite as: Carah, N. (2020). ‘Mobile Marketing’ (pp. 1-16) in Ling, R., Fortunati, L., Goggin, G, Lim, S., Li, Y. (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Communication and Society. Oxford University Press: Oxford. Introduction What defines life in a consumer culture now? For much of the twentieth century it meant being immersed in the sensory consumption of promotional appeals, experiences and imagery (Leach 1993, Lears 1995, Preciado 2014). With the ubiquity of smartphones and digital platforms, a fundamental shift has taken place. Life in a consumer culture now involves being tethered to digital platforms that engineer attention, engagement and analytics for marketers (Alaimo and Kallinikos 2016, Andrejevic 2013, Ekbia and Nardi 2014, Gerlitz and Helmond 2013, Zuboff 2015). While we are still enveloped in the sensory consumption of marketing appeals – in shops, malls and clubs; as flows of images on billboards and television – consumer culture is increasingly governed by platforms designed to shape and optimise our attention. Consumers translate their experience of consumer culture into content and data on platforms, and those platforms respond to them in real- time, customising images and ideas to respond to their preferences, location and actions (Andrejevic 2013, Zuboff 2015). The mobile device is central to these developments. What is mobile marketing? Kaplan defines mobile marketing as ‘any marketing activity conducted through a ubiquitous network to which consumers are constantly connected using a personal device’ (2012: 130). This definition invites us to approach mobile marketing as a series of techniques developed over the past two decades. In a straightforward sense, mobile marketing involves practices like using customer databases to send SMS messages (Lamberton and Stephen 2016), targeting consumers via apps when they are in or near retail stores (Turow 2017), or targeting promotional posts or filters into Instagram or Snapchat feeds based on factors like our interests or location. The use of mobile devices by marketers emerges from a culture of ubiquitous connectivity increasingly shaped by major digital media platforms such as Google and Facebook. Smartphones are integrated into the rhythms of everyday life, capturing and structuring attention and action. Market researchers claim that US consumers spend 5 hours a day on their smartphone, half of it on social media, messaging and entertainment apps (Perez 2017a). In 2017, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told an earnings call that users spend on average 50 minutes a day on the Facebook, Instagram and Messenger apps (Constine 2017). The cumulative effect of this engagement is important, as over a period of ten years, the average Facebook user would spend 3000 hours translating their experience and attention into data that trains the platform algorithms. In this chapter, I argue that the mobile device is part of a critical transformation in marketing. In the space of a decade, the mobile device has become the critical interface between cultural life and marketing. Media devices have long sat at the touchpoint between marketers and consumers. In the twentieth century these devices included television, radio, billboards. These devices tended to be immobile, one-way and mass. By contrast, the smartphone is mobile, two-way and customised. With mass media technologies, it was difficult to recuperate the creativity of consumers back into the imagery and narratives of brands in real-time (Author). With the smartphone however, a culture emerges where consumers translate their lives into flows of images, expressions and data. I begin by suggesting that a pre-history of mobile marketing alerts us to the ways in which it is embedded in marketers’ longer-term efforts to create a participatory and reflexive mode of branding that began to emerge with the ‘creative revolution’ of the 1960s (Frank 1998). The creative revolution began to imagine consumers as active participants in the marketing process. Modern marketing since the post-war period has been characterized by the effort to create techniques that make consumers visible and productive for corporations. I argue that devices like the smartphone are taken up by marketers as part of their ongoing efforts to harness consumers as productive laborers in the process of making both valuable brands and efficient marketing systems. In the second part of the chapter, I focus on the relationship between smartphones and digital media platforms. Mobile marketing is intrinsic to the development of platforms such as Facebook, Google, Instagram and Snapchat. These platforms each operate under the commercial imperative to generate revenue from selling content, services or advertising. They play a critical role in facilitating the integration of the smartphone into everyday cultural practices on the one hand, and then on the other, making those practices available to marketers as moments of attention and engagement. The platform is the critical force in making the smartphone an always-on touchpoint between consumers and marketers. In the final part of the chapter, I consider how mobile marketing creates and leverages new forms of consumer labor. As the smartphone becomes the critical interface between marketing and culture, consumers become more and more productive parts of the marketing process. They play the crucial role of translating cultural life into data that feeds marketing analytics, of integrating marketing appeals into the performance of their lives on mobile social media platforms, and using mobile platforms to coordinate their movements in markets. The chapter takes a critical approach, informed by media and cultural studies’ attention to platforms, brand culture and audience labor. By doing so, I argue that the mobile is significant not only because of the way it enables marketers to invade privacy or colonise attention – it does both these things – but more profoundly because of the way it integrates the consumer into the marketing process. At least one consequence of this change is the need to reconsider how marketing shapes our culture and our lived experience. The prehistory of mobile marketing: making consumers visible and productive During the latter part of the twentieth century, the idea that the consumer was an active, and sometimes empowered, part of the marketing process became increasingly mainstream in business literature and academic theory (Holt 2002, Zwick et al. 2008). This was evident in frameworks like customer relationship marketing, value co-creation and the service dominant logic of marketing (Beckett and Nayak 2008, Vargo and Lusch 2004, Zwick et al. 2008, Prahalad and Ramaswamy 2004). These ways of thinking about the consumer partly had their roots in the way advertisers and marketers responded to, and recuperated, the symbolic resistance and cynicism of the counter- culture (Frank 1998, Holt 2002). From cultural critique of marketing, media and the mass society (Frank 1998, Holt 2002), through to marketing theory (Gronroos 2012), the emphasis shifted away from understanding marketing and advertising as a process of top-down persuasion or ideological manipulation of passive consumers. Instead, consumers came to be understood as participants in a more open-ended and flexible marketing process. This shift unfolded as part of the larger transition from a mass to a networked (and more recently platform or surveillance) mode of capitalism (Harvey 1989, Hearn 2008, Holt 2002, Zwick et al. 2008, Zuboff 2015). In societies characterised by fragmenting media channels, proliferating lifestyle-based identities, growing opportunities for self- expression, and greater choice, marketers had to embrace a more dynamic relationship with consumers (Author, Holt 2002). Mobile marketing emerges from this history. In this way of thinking, brands are ‘social processes’ that seek to harness and guide consumer creativity (Lury 2004, Moor 2003). This kind of marketing works in one direction by offering consumers cultural resources that they incorporate into their own lives and identities (Holt 2002, Hearn 2008, Moor 2003, Thompson and Arsel 2004); and in the other direction by monitoring the creative appropriations consumers make of brands, products and services (Andrejevic 2013, Moor 2003, Zwick 2009, Lury 2009, Turow 2011). One of the lessons of marketers’ efforts to create more flexible brands and promotional strategies is that granting more freedom to consumers must be accompanied by the development of techniques that monitor, mine and harvest the creativity generated (Frank 1998, Zwick et al. 2008). If marketers were to have a more open-ended relationship with consumers then they needed to create techniques for harnessing their participation and making them visible. Using media to build the cultural atmosphere of consumption Throughout the twentieth century, marketers created environments that used a combination of architecture, media technologies and human laborers to stimulate and shape the affective experience of consumers, channel their creativity, and monitor their actions (Kottler 1973, Leach 1993, Preciado 2014). These spaces became synonymous with the public culture of consumer societies: malls, shops, restaurants and cafes, hotels, concert and sports stadiums, nightclubs and music festivals. The purposeful use of media technologies was intrinsic to these marketing strategies (Preciado 2014, Turow 2017), and they serve as an important pre-cursor to? the use of mobile media by marketers