1) What is the charity link to her Smart Water brand ambassador role and how does this link to the celebrity persona she has created?
"As ambassador for the premium water brand, Zendaya will appear in a series of new creative celebrating those defining ‘smart’ on their own terms, and support community water programmes that directly impact women. She will work with the Global Water Challenge, a charity working to help achieve universal access to clean drinking water, by launching the smart solutions: global water challenge, inviting local organisations to apply for funding to GWC’s women for water action platform."
2) Read the analysis of Zendaya’s social media profile. What statistics support why she is described as ‘a high-ranking celebrity influencer’?
“We could not be more thrilled to have Zendaya join smartwater as the newest face of our brand,” said Matrona Filippou, Global Category President, Hydration, Sports, Tea & Coffee, The Coca-Cola Company. “A global icon and cultural force, Zendaya isn’t afraid to be true to herself, and that’s what makes her the perfect addition to the smartwater family.”
“I’m very excited to begin this new relationship with smartwater,” said Zendaya. “We all know how important it is to stay hydrated and smartwater is my go-to source no matter what I am doing throughout the day.”
3) What details are provided about Zendaya’s audience?
"Drinks brand smartwater speaks to a 59% female audience across both Instagram and Twitter. Single or married, its followers are most typically 25-29, though its reach expands both younger and older."
4) What psychographic groups would fit the profile for Zendaya’s audience in this case study?
Mainstreamers
5) Why does the case study suggest Zendaya is a good fit for the Smart Water brand?
"Zendaya and smartwater are more or less aligned when it comes to age, gender and location demographics. It may be that the brand are hoping the star will raise its profile with younger consumers, as well as tapping into her 190m social reach and over £1m social media value. Zendaya also has well above average equity, appeal and awareness scores and is one of the biggest names on the planet right now. She is no stranger to brand partnerships, but this marks her first drinks collaboration and continues her philanthropic project work."
Social media data analysis
1) Pick out three notable statistics from the site.
185,469,820 Followers
3.49% Engagement Rate
6,445,138 Average Likes
2) Scroll down through the data available. Who are Zendaya’s top mentions and what does this suggest about how she uses the account?
Top @Mentions
Top mentions from the last 10 posts
3) How does Zendaya’s Instagram engagement rate of 3%+ compare with the average engagement rate for accounts with more than 100,000 followers?
Average Engagement Rates on Instagram
These are overall / average engagement rates found on Instagram. Statistics based on analysis of more than 1 million influencer profiles.
| Followers | Average Values of Instagram Profiles | Profile Engagement |
|---|
| < 1,000 | 8% | |
| < 5,000 | 5.7% | |
| < 10,000 | 4% | |
| < 100,000 | 2.4% | |
| 100,000+ | 1.7% |  3.49% |
Zendaya: audience questions and theories
Finally, work through the following questions to apply media debates and theories to the Zendaya CSP:
1) Is Zendaya’s website and social media constructed to appeal to a particular gender or audience?
Website is not available.
2) What opportunities are there for audience interaction in Zendaya’s online presence and how controlled are these?
"Zendaya also positions herself as an intersectional feminist seeking ways to address issues that affect women from all backgrounds regardless of their ethnicity, class, and sexuality. When she was featured as the cover star of Cosmopolitan’s July 2016 issue, she told the publication “It’s hard as a young person of a different ethnicity or background to look at the TV and not see anyone who looks like you. Representation is very important.”
3) How does Zendaya’s social media presence reflect Clay Shirky’s ‘End of Audience’ theories?
In the traditional model of media consumption, audiences simply read the newspapers and watched television programmes produced by the large media outlets. Moving from the broadcast to broadband, social media has enabled audiences to be active participants and engage directly with the content creators. Clay Shirky argued this shift in consumption challenges the old power structures and offers new opportunities for individuals to shape the world.
4) What effects might Zendaya’s online presence have on audiences? Is it designed to influence the audience’s views on social or political issues or is this largely a vehicle to promote Zendaya’s work?
Media Effects theories attempt to explain how content can influence the audience and society as a whole. Known as the cultivation theory, Gerbner argued heavy users of television were more likely to view the world as hostile and violent because they saw those representations on the screen. Albert Bandura also showed viewers would imitate behaviour they observed on television through a process he called symbolic modelling.
5) Applying Hall’s Reception theory, what might be a preferred and oppositional reading of Zendaya’s online presence?
Audiences will interpret the messages according to their own framework of knowledge. Zendaya wants to inspire the audience, so the preferred reading is linked to personal identity.
Industries
How social media companies make money
1) How many users do the major social media sites boast?
"As of Q4 2022, Meta (META), formerly Facebook, had 2.96 billion monthly active users.1 Twitter (now X) stopped reporting monthly active users, but the last count in Q1 2019 was 330 million, while LinkedIn had about 900 million monthly active users as of Q1 2023."
2) What is the main way social media sites make money?
"Social media companies like Meta (formerly Facebook) and X Corp. (formerly Twitter Inc.), primarily make money through selling advertising."
3) What does ARPU stand for and why is it important for social media companies?
4) Why has Meta spent huge money acquiring other brands like Instagram and WhatsApp?
"WhatsApp boasts over 2 billion monthly active users, which to Meta management means an even greater stock of susceptible minds to sell as a unit to companies looking to, for instance, move a few more smartphones this quarter. Every acquisition Meta has made since, whether it was $1 billion for Instagram or $19 billion for WhatsApp, was conducted with the same goal in mind."
5) What other methods do social media sites have to generate income e.g. Twitter Blue?
"Under the new system that Musk implemented in 2023, however, checkmarks became a symbol that users had subscribed to X Premium. X Premium subscribers receive benefits including editable posts, fewer ads, longer posts, and more robust security measures. This service costs $8 per month or $84 per year."
Regulation of social media
1) What suggestions does the report make? Pick out three you think are particularly interesting.
- "Implementing "circuit breakers" so that newly viral content is temporarily stopped from spreading while it is fact-checked,forcing social networks to disclose in the news feed why content has been recommended to a user and limiting the use of micro-targeting advertising messages."
2) Who is Christopher Wylie?
"Christopher Wylie is a Canadian data consultant. He is noted as the whistleblower who released a cache of documents to The Guardian he obtained while he worked at Cambridge Analytica." -Google
3) What does Wylie say about the debate between media regulation and free speech?
"In an interview with BBC News, Mr Wylie said the report's recommendations had been designed to protect individuals' free expression."
4) What is ‘disinformation’ and do you agree that there are things that are objectively true or false?
Disinformation is deliberately misleading or biased information and I believe that things aren't objectively true or false as everything could be subjective."
5) Why does Wylie compare Facebook to an oil company?
"An oil company would say: "We do not profit from pollution." Pollution is a by-product - and a harmful by-product. Regardless of whether Facebook profits from hate or not, it is a harmful by-product of the current design and there are social harms that come from this business model."
6) What does it suggest a consequence of regulating the big social networks might be?
"The way Facebook approaches these problems is: we'll wait and see and figure out a problem when it emerges. Every other industry has to have minimum safety standards and consider the risks that could be posed to people, through risk mitigation and prevention. "
7) What has Instagram been criticised for?
"This is a product of a platform that is making recommendations to you. These algorithms work by picking up what you engage with and then they show you more and more of that. In the report, we talk about a "cooling-off period". You could require algorithms to have a trigger that results in a cooling-off period for a certain type of content. If it has just spent the past week showing you body-building ads, it could then hold off for the next two weeks. If you want to promote body building, you can. But from the user's perspective, they should not be constantly bombarded with a singular theme.""
8) Can we apply any of these criticisms or suggestions to Zendaya? For example, should Zendaya have to explicitly make clear when she is being paid to promote a company or cause?
I believe that Zendaya should make it clear when she is promoting as it allows her audience to not be mislead onto what is genuinely her posting and what is required of her to post.
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