Virtual influencers in various forms are capturing a growing share of ad spend from human influencers. Followers respond to virtual influencers much as if they were human, with engagement rates and measures of trust and source credibility that rival their human counterparts. However, there is an acute need for more nuanced understanding of the differential characteristics of user engagement with human influencers and the many emerging forms, types and interactional characteristics of virtual influencers. We conduct an exploratory study of three parts. First, through an indepth review of the existing literature, we delineate the implications of unsettled taxonomies of virtual influencers by function and form, and we outline a revised typology. Second, our secondary review of virtual influencer literature, trade, and industry sources conceptualizes divergent factors influencing the persuasive capability of human and virtual influencers while identifying intersecting research themes. From this synthesis we induce suggestions for future research and practice. Finally, we assess, refine and adjust our framework through depth interviews with leading expert practitioners to generate six key findings to guide future researched-backed virtual influencer practice and research.

In this commentary, I use selected autoethnographic passages from my life in teaching to reflect on what, if anything, the designation of ‘critical’ might mean in my own practice of marketing education. I draw selectively on some ideas from educational and critical theory, particularly the notion of interpellation as applied to marketing academics, to reach the conclusion that my personal idea of critical marketing pedagogy is probably closer to the notion of classroom education as a subversive practice than it is to any neo-Marxist versions of liberatory pedagogy. Ernest Hemingway suggested that the primary virtue of a writer’s education ought to be the refinement of the students’ ability to detect crap. By nurturing the fundamental transferable life-skill of crap detection, I like to think that marketing can fulfil a worthwhile pedagogic role alongside the other subjects in a liberal intellectual university curriculum.

Marketing has become a vibrant academic field and a highly popular university subject choice globally since Philip Kotler (1967) first popularised the discipline with his seminal text Marketing Management: Analysis, Planning and Control. The normative, managerial paradigm popularised by Kotler remains the dominant influence in marketing thought and pedagogy, yet it has many shortcomings, one of which is the fact that it was conceived for a very different world to the one we now face. In this Pensata I argue that Marketing pedagogy must be conceived as an intellectually critical discipline if it is to serve the needs of contemporary students, organisations and universities. In order to be an intellectually critical discipline, I suggest that Marketing must engage critically with its own ideological character if it is to equip students with the skills to navigate their path through an ideologically inflected world.

Book synopsis: Using a wide range of visual examples and case studies, Advertising and Promotion 4th edition introduces the reader to the key concepts, methods and issues and illustrates these with first-hand examples gathered from leading international advertising agencies and brand campaigns. Told from the perspective of the agency, it gives a fun and creative insider view helping the reader to think beyond the client position and understand what it might be like working within an ad agency. Drawing not only from management and marketing research but also from other disciplines such as cultural/media studies and sociology, the authors offer a rounded and critical perspective on the subject to those looking to understand advertising as social phenomenon in addition to its business function and purpose. The new edition has in-depth coverage of online advertising and the role of social media in advertising including metrics and analytics and includes advertising examples by global brands including Adidas, Benetton, BMW, Dove and DeBeers. “Snapshots” bring in aspects of cross-cultural advertising such as Barbie in China. The book is complemented by a companion website featuring a range of tools and resources for lecturers and students, including PowerPoint slides, SAGE journal articles, links to further online resources and author Videos. The textbook is also supported by an author-written blog which keeps readers updated on interesting, topical examples relating to advertising and promotion from current affairs and popular culture: www.hackleyadvertisingandpromotion.blogspot.com. Suitable for Advertising, Marketing and Communications modules at undergraduate or postgraduate level.

This chapter mainly is concerned with studies of organisational autoethnography from the perspective of people who are not necessarily members of organisations, and hence it falls within Herrmann’s broadened scope for the area. It discusses some of the epistemological arguments that have been offered around the use of autoethnography within broader debates around what it means to conduct scientific social research. The chapter explores the discomforting character of autoethnography as it plays out in business school research. Anthropological research perspectives have been present in academic marketing research journals since the 1950s although, as Holbrook notes, they were not included in mainstream accounts of the discipline. The sense of an ontological divide in academic marketing research shouldn’t be overstated – there is much methodological pluralism in this vast field and its many scores of journals reflect this. Autoethnography articulates and constitutes experience from a subjectivist position located in culture, class and race.

This paper discusses the mechanisms of post-digital consumer cultural meaning-making using advertising as its point of departure. The assumption is that the post-digital is neither an era nor an epoch but a characterisation that reflects a consumer cultural world of digitised content that operates as a default for many consumers, while the analogue world hovers ghost-like, re-asserting itself where digital technologies cannot serve, where and when they cannot be accessed, or when they fail. In this post-digital world, the locus of consumer cultural meaning-making has shifted, from long-form advertising campaigns, to fragmented and polysemous intertexts that circulate kinetically via social media. In other words, the locus of consumer cultural meaning-making has shifted from the primary texts of brand marketing, to secondary or paratexts. Drawing on Gérard Genette’s theory of transtextuality, the paper discusses how this post-digital meaning-making mechanism plays out, for brands, and beyond, within a post-digital consumer culture. Article received: May 25, 2020; Article accepted: June 30, 2020; Published online: September 15, 2020; Original scholarly paper