Advertising or not advertising: Representations and expressions of advertising digital literacy on social media

Abstract

Brands are ubiquitous for the last years, they are present in almost every space on the web and especially in social computing, social networks, and social media. Their presence is linked to different aims and accompanied by comments. Mainly, the professional point of view focuses on the idea that social media provide the possibility of a conversation based on transparency, equality, and proximity. These professional discourses stress the fact, whenever it comes to social media marketing, that these devices enable brands to speak directly with consumers and, thus, avoid communicating only with traditional advertising, or “paid media.” These transformations seek to ensure advertising to be in the most frequented and wanted media spaces. These hybridizations and all the inventiveness actors can put in the process are limited in many ways, beginning with the trust they have to ensure with their audiences which are used to media spaces as they practice them and the possible saturation of the same spaces. We intend, with a socio-semio-communication based method rooted in the scientific frame of French information and communication sciences, to question the grand metamorphoses all brand messages are undergoing under the strain of many different rationales. On the go, years after years, metamorphoses and hybridizations coming one after another, web users are developing skills and abilities regarding advertising and market discourses on the web. They build experience in the ability to identify and appreciate brand discourses; they do differentiate discourses and show a growing ability to identify the traits of marketing and advertising discourses as such. In this respect, the advertising show and the hybridizations can both benefit or be threatened by this growing mastering.