BCM241 – Time to plan

Now it’s time to plan. Sophie and I have established our niche “Online Advertising Amongst Social Media Platforms” And have organised what topics within this niche we want to research. After gathering our ideas and narrowing our niche to are more specific industry, it is time to move on. The next step to reaching our goals is begin researching, we will be doing this through three steps. These three steps are to problematise from our research, create a research plan and then schedule our research.

Problematising

The first step is to problematise our niche, Sophie and I have pinpointed key issues in our niche that can help people better understand what we are discussing. By discovering problems in our niche, it will later aid us in our digital artefact at the end of the semester. Bringing issues forward, gives our niche a different dynamic. It allows people to see our niche from a polar opposite perspective. We discovered that advertising on social media platforms from influencers is not always positive encourage many issues. Although many people buy into products that influencers advertise, advertising can also have an ulterior effect and will deter people from buying into these companies. An example of this is the recent controversy surrounding Shane Dawson and Jeffree Star, many of the young audience will not buy into their products due to no longer supporting their actions.

Some of the problems that we narrowed down and will research include:

defamation of companies
Wrongful advertising
Controversy over advertised company’s brand (eg. An influencer advertising a company that does not relate to their own brand or advertising a controversial company)
Discrediting brands

Our paradigmatic framework will explore the content shared from social media influencers e.g. Charli and Dixie D’amelio, and taking notes on how they advertise brands across their social platforms ie. TikTok

Research plan

Sophie and I will be using both qualitative and quantitative research methods to help us reach our end goal. Examples of this are surveys, analytics and specific case studies. Throughout our research we will be recording notes on our shared google document and gathering data that we will later put all together into final digital artefact. We will be looking closely at the companies being advertised, who is advertising them, what platforms they are being advertised on and the response to these advertisements by audiences. The main ethnography method we will be using is “audience ethnographies”, the way audiences respond the media through culture, politics etc. We will be using this article as a example in association with our studies: http://www.globalmediajournal.com/open-access/audience-ethnographies-a-media-engagement-approach.php?aid=35086

Research scheduling

Due to Covid, Sophie and I have had to adapt to a new environment and discover new ways of studying from home (along with everyone else). for obvious reasons, doing a joint DA will be challenging yet technology is helping us still work together. We plan on contributing 3-4 hours weekly to our work and will communicate over discord calls and Facebook messenger. Shown below is our research schedule for the rest of the semester.