OSP: Audience and Industries blog tasks

 OSP: Audience and Industries blog tasks

Work through the following tasks to complete our OSP work:

Audience

1) Who are the potential target audiences for Marcus Rashford and Kim Kardashian's online content? Try and cover both demographics and psychographics.

Marcus Rashford- demographics: teenage boys and young adults of all social classes, for inspiration to success                               - psychographics: reformers that support his political campaigns and are also inspired by his                                                                success.

Kim K- demographics: teenage girls and young adults as well as middle aged women also mainly of the middle to                                      upper classes.                                                                                                                                   - psychographics: aspirers, who are interested in beauty as well as successful appearances and wealth.

2) Marcus Rashford’s online presence is partly driven by his excellent use of social media. How does he use social media to engage with his fans and make them feel part of his brand?

He uses social media to promote mainstream brands such as Nike and Coca-Cola, in which almost all audiences can relate to and are interested in and also his engagement rate was extremely high at the time of his political campaigns and still is considered good after focusing on football and gaining a lot more followers.

3) What is Instagram engagement rate and what engagement rates do Marcus Rashford and Kim Kardashian have? 

Rashford: 6% during the time of this campaigning work but reduced to 3.2% due to increase in followers and focus on football career.

Kardashian: 0.33%, but she still has over 350 million followers.

4) Go to Marcus Rashford and Kim Kardashian's X or Instagram account. Find and screenshot/link three posts that show the different aspects of their brand e.g. Relatable person (normal, down to earth), Campaigner (interested in politics), Celebrity (e.g. awards ceremony or fashion), Brand promotion (e.g. selling a product).

              

5) What audience pleasures are provided by Marcus Rashford's online presence? What about Kim Kardashian? Try and apply Blumler and Katz's Uses and Gratifications theory here. 

Marcus:  Diversion- his football career and passion for the sport

                Personal identity- his hobbies that teenage boys can relate to such as football

                Personal relationships- through his kind acts, such as helping with food poverty, people can build a                                                                fanbase out of admiration of his work

                Surveillance- people can learn from his campaigns and also consider helping others just like he does

Kim:   Diversion- her passions for makeup and beauty as well as her looks for events can be entertaining to see

           Personal identity- people (especially teenage girls) can relate to her interest of appearances and looks

           Personal relationships- people may admire her style and fashion sense, which can also be seen from her                                                    clothing website : KARDASHIAN KLOSET, which creates a connection between                                                        Kardashian and her audiences

           Surveillance- people can learn how to be successful through her brand deals and endorsements as well as                                   her abilities to gain millions of followers and likes on her socials.

6) Applying Stuart Hall's Reception theory, what would a preferred and oppositional reading of Marcus Rashford and Kim Kardashian's online presence be?

• Preferred reading (people who support Rashford/Kardashian): RASHFORD- the liking of the footballer profession as well as wanting to help other people and spread kindness.  KARDASHIAN- interests in fashion and beauty, as well as the idea that high wealth statuses hold power over everyone else in the social hierarchy
• Oppositional reading (people who criticise Rashford/Kardashian): RASHFORD- some members of parliament may believe that he is pretending to be good due to the ideology that humans always have good and evil within them.   KARDASHIAN- many women may feel that she is the walking image of a fantasy and that she is just emphasising women to erase their insecurities by going through expensive procedures to remove one's natural beauty.

Industries

1) What is Marcus Rashford and Kim Kardashian's net worth and how does their online presence help them to make money? 

Marcus: makes money through high end endorsements and his football career

• £300,000 per week from Manchester United (£15.6m a year)
• £2m endorsement deal with Nike
• Additional deals with Burberry, Jaguar Land Rover, Coca-Cola and others

Kim K: makes her money through brand endorsements and her own brands

• The Kardashians TV show on Hulu is a $100m deal
• Her brands SKIMS, KKW Beauty and many more

2) What companies/brands are Rashford and Kardashian associated with? Why might they want to be linked to those celebrities?

MR- Nike, Coca-cola, Land Rover, Burberry, Selfridges, FareShare, NatWest

KK- SKIMS, SKKN, Balenciaga (up until 2022, when she cut ties due to backlash), Dash boutique

3) Research Twitter/X and Instagram. Who owns the companies, how do they make money and how much profit did they make last year?

Twitter:

• Twitter was started by Jack Dorsey in 2006. It has over 500 million active users worldwide. 
• Twitter’s revenue is around $3 billion. 
• 2022- $513 million profit

Instagram:

• Instagram is an image and video sharing site launched in 2010. 
• In 2012 it was bought by Facebook for $1 billion. Facebook and Instagram’s parent company is now called Meta – a global conglomerate.
• Instagram revenue in 2023 was $61 BILLION.

4) What are the worries about Instagram’s negative effects?

• Research suggests that Instagram is damaging to mental health – particularly for teenage girls.
• Facebook’s own research suggested this – but they allegedly kept this secret.
• The research suggested one in three girls felt bad about their bodies and Instagram made this worse. It is also linked to increased anxiety and depression.

5) How do social media platforms manage online abuse on their platforms and why has Marcus Rashford drawn attention to this? How might this change in the future?

Through regulation (Ofcom), also:

• Removing content: Platforms like Facebook and Twitter remove comments and accounts that violate their rules. 
• Collaborating with partners: Platforms work with football authorities, clubs, and players to identify and tackle abuse. 
• Setting rules: Platforms set their own rules about what's acceptable on their platforms. 

Marcus Rashford has drawn attention to online abuse on social media after he and other players have been targeted by racist abuse: 

• Responding to abuse

  Rashford has responded to abuse by saying he's proud of who he is and that he won't share details of the abuse. 
• Highlighting the issue

  Rashford has said that abuse on social media should be easy to stop. He's also said that social media can be a positive force, such as when he used it to raise awareness about feeding vulnerable families during the pandemic. 

In the future, the Online Safety Bill could give the government more power to hold social media companies accountable for removing harmful content. The Bill could allow the government to issue fines of up to £18 million or 10% of a company's global turnover if they don't comply with the new rules.

6) What happened by law in 2022 that changed the way the internet is regulated? Write three changes that this new law may bring in and explain why it is difficult to regulate the internet.

Online Safety Bill:

The government is introducing the Online Safety bill to try and add regulation of the internet to Ofcom’s role as media regulator. This includes:

• Sending threatening posts being punishable by jail sentences.
• Platforms like X and Instagram having to actively prevent users seeing harmful material – or risk being fined by Ofcom.
• Platforms paying Ofcom to regulate their content.