About the Author
This website represents the culmination of my time at the University of Texas at Austin receiving my Masters in Media Studies.
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I first began to take an interest in machine-human interactions and relationships in Dr. Sharon Strover's "Communication, Technology, and Culture" class, where I was first introduced to the digital influencer Lil Miquela. Miquela was the start of my thinking about the ways that we integrate machines and technology into our daily lives. In following this line of enquiry, I found myself contemplating the way that in taking a recuperative stance toward technology, and in looking at our images of machines and tech through a queer lens, can reveal new modes of being in the world. I found myself transfixed by the ways that these creations are frequently the backdrop that allow humans a way to imagine a different world and a different self. More often than not, these imaginings take on a distinctly counter-hegemonic sensibility.
Halfway through “Communication, Technology, and Culture” (Spring 2020), the COVID-19 pandemic forced us into remote online courses. I’m writing this section on the one-year anniversary of the World Health Organization declaring a worldwide pandemic. Since then, I’ve completed the majority of my Masters remotely.
Product Placement and Branding
Lil Miquela continues to confuse the line between virtual and real by being featured in ad campaigns for both Samsung and Calvin Klein.
Samsung
Product placement within performances of mundanity and self-documenting the excitement.
Miquela's first post (February 21, 2019) featuring a Samsung galaxy phone.
For over a year, Lil Miquela has had a contract with Samsung, specifically for their Galaxy S10 model of phone (although she has one post with the S20 model and one with the Galaxy Z Flip) . Her relationship with Samsung has manifested in multiple forms. She is part of two video spots for the company. One of them is a 20 second video solely focused on her. It begins with her walking into frame and her voice saying, “Everything seemed unimaginable when I was just a few lines of code.” This line simultaneously furthers her identity away from human while still keeping her in the realm of “sentient being,” instead of a CGI creation. The next video produced by Samsung features the other members of #TeamGalaxy ; musician Steve Aoki, gamer Tyler Blevins (Ninja), and actress Millie Bobby Brown. It’s worth noting that the footage in this video is the exact same as that of the previous, yet Miquela is the only character that doesn’t speak. Shown in the recording studio with Blevins, she looks at the camera as it quick-cuts away from her and towards her again (this time in different clothing) in front of a wall. She stands defiantly in front of the wall, her own moving images populating behind her. These images, her life lived in photographs and on a platform, wordlessly hint at her own digitality.
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Samsung featured alongside other, separate, endorsements.
A number of photos that Lil Miquela has posted advertise for both Samsung and another company. For example, her partnership with #kitstokickcancer in support of Women’s Cancer Research Fund (@wcrfcure) is a 3-tiered post, each brand reaping the benefits of association. In deconstructing the image:
To see Samsung's product placement in Miquela's "Speak Up" music video, click here.
Layer 1: Lil Miquela is sitting against a wall in a simple light pink bra and underwear set. She is holding a cell phone. There is a caption on the side.
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Layer 2: Lil Miquela is in a light pink KiT Undergarments, bra and underwear set holding a Samsung Galaxy S10 phone. The caption explains why she joined #kitstokickcancer, KiT's campaign to help raise money for the Women's Cancer Research Fund which is a holding of the Breast Cancer Research Foundation (@bcrfcure).
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Layer 3: The three companies/organizations play themselves out over Miquela's Instagram post. Miquela and Samsung are able to put their image to a veritable cause, and by extension look altruistic in the process. KiT Underwear also benefits from being on Lil Miquela's profile, with over 2.2 million followers. Upon inspection, only a few of KiT's photos exceed 1,000 likes. The same can be said for the Women's Cancer Research Fund and the Breast Cancer Research Foundation with hardly any of their photos breaking even 500 likes.
Miquela's ability to be featured both independently and with others as a virtual construction speaks to the power that she wields within the advertising world. She is able to monetize her image. In keeping with the sense of an integration of machine and human, Miquela continues to present a future where the robots are seamlessly integrated into market capitalism. In fact, they seem to desire it for themselves as well. ​
Speaking Your Truth with Calvin Klein
Authenticity as a Construction of Commodity
Bella Hadid and Miquela's Calvin Klein commercial spot
On May 16, 2019 Miquela posted a photo of her with model Bella Hadid and the caption "No one else can define our own truths. #MYTRUTH #MYCALVINS followed by a separate post of a short video of her and Hadid in a Calvin Klein advertisement. In the advertisement Hadid’s voiceover states, “Life is about opening doors," As the camera continues to pan in a circular motion, Miquela walks into the frame. She approaches Hadid. As strings are introduced to the chill electronic beat, Hadid says, "creating new dreams you never knew could exist.” Her and Miquela then embrace and share a kiss. The camera pans out to show them in head-to-toe Calvin Klein as the lights fade. The screen fades to black and the words “Calvin Klein” appear on screen.
Reception
While a feat of digital manipulation, the ad was met with rabid accusations of “queerbating” from the LGBTQ community. Queerbating is “an exploitative tactic used to tease a queer romance to draw viewers in without any intention of fully developing or representing LGBTQ people and relationships.”
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Many of the issues that viewers drew from the ad stemmed from the fact that Bella Hadid has been in a number of high-profile heterosexual relationships (The Weeknd, Odell Beckham Jr.), yet she was chosen to kiss another woman…who isn’t even real. Calvin Klein depicted a same-sex kiss but managed, through the workaround of Lil Miquela, to actually not engage with any of these surrounding issues, or even the kiss itself at all. This is a shame, like the online publication Indie states, because the “brand’s public efforts towards casting sexually, gender, and bodily diverse individuals have performed quite nicely.”
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See Calvin's MY TRUTH campaign video to the right.
To me, the CK ad reads the same as Lil Miquela’s “Speak Up” music video (click here for my analysis of the video). Lil Miquela is constructed and filmed in such a way that positions her for consumption not representation. The pan out to a wide, full body shot at the end is what cinches it for me. They stand there, embracing, with Calvin Klein’s logo illuminated for all to see.
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In doing so, the ad also teases out the tensions between commodification and branding. In her booth Authentic: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture, Sarah Banet-Weiser defines the differences between commodification and branding.
CK's MY TRUTH campaign
Lil Miquela and Brand Culture
"Commodification implies a literal transformation of things into commodities…it means to make commercial something that was not previously thought of as a product, such as a melody or racial identity. Commodification is a marketing strategy, a monetization of different spheres of life, a transformation of social and cultural life into something that can be bought and sold."
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Banet-Weiser, 4
An Authentic Commodity?
Like with other influencers, Miquela highlights the lack of a clear “demarcation between marketer and consumer, between seller and buyer” (7). In addition, she, as a creation, is indicative of the changing and increasingly complex advertising strategies, “especially in a digital media environment where viral ads, guerrilla marketing, online consumer campaigns and competitions, and user feedback mechanisms are ways for corporations to script advertising messages that feel distinctly noncommercial, and therefore authentic” (11, my italics). Banet-Weiser argues that this notion of “authenticity” also has its place within a branded culture, something that Miquela frequently capitalizes upon. In an advanced capital society, “authenticity is not only understood and experienced as
Banet-Weiser continues to assert that “commodities are a crucial part of these stories about ourselves—the process of branding is broader [and] situated within culture” (5).
In making “something that was not previously thought of as a product” commercial, how does Lil Miquela fit into brand culture (4)? How does Lil Miquela affect the narratives we tell ourselves about ourselves? I argue that Miquela herself, by having no agency of her own—only that of her creators, is a commodity herself. While Henry Jenkins and others (12) argue that consumers still maintain agency in the complex network of cultural dynamics and media convergence (12). In creating Lil Miquela, and effectively avoiding the spotlight, Brud complicates the relationship between commodification and branding. Miquela exists in a bizarre limbo of interacting with brands, but unable to make the decision of which brands for herself. Her very construction by Brud toes the line between a commodity and a branded self. If branding is ultimately the “transformation of everyday, lived culture to brand culture (5) how does an entity like Lil Miquela, who doesn’t live, who only resides on the internet engage in branding?
the pure, inner self of the individual, it is also a relationship between individuals and commodity culture that is constructed as ‘authentic’” (14). In 21st century marketing, the notion of "authenticity" becomes even more intertwined with the "increasingly elaborate relationships between producers and consumers, [namely] through the principle of 'engagement'" (38). Where does Lil Miquela reside on this spectrum? Is she a producer or a consumer? Does the fact that she's a construction of commodity culture herself make any difference?
Seeing the interpolation of authenticity and capitalism, it becomes increasingly difficult for me to see CK’s use of Hadid and Miquela as anything less than an attempt to portray their brand as technologically modern (i.e. “cool”) and inclusive, without having to engage in the labor of actually doing so (thus risking the possible blowback/alienation of a largely heteronormative audience).