I begin this talk by examining brand engagements with cultural events and social and mobile forms of media over the past decade. In this period brands have adapted culturally-embedded strategies to capitalise on the responsive, algorithmic and data-driven capacities of mobile and social media. Brands create cultural spaces and experiences attuned to the way social media’s algorithms sort and display content. The more participants on a platform like Facebook or Instagram circulate and interact with images, the more those platforms can make judgments about links and similarities between individuals and the more likely they are to be visible to each other.

To illustrate some of the characteristics and implications of this mode of branding I focus on the specific case of the alcohol industry. This industry has been a key innovator in the development of a mode of branding that brings together real-world cultural engagements with the algorithmic capacities of social media. I trace a number of examples of alcohol brand activity at cultural events like music festivals and on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. By the end of 2012 the top twenty alcohol brands on Facebook in Australia had 2.5 million fans. During 2012 they generated over 2.3 million interactions with those fans. Brands generate value on Facebook by attracting the attention of consumers, building affinity with their identities, and engaging with them in real-world cultural spaces. These activities are integrated with the calculative and predictive capacities of Facebook. If, for example, a brand establishes a themed ‘activation’ at an event like a music festival and encourages audiences to interact with the space using their smartphones and social media profiles; then Facebook provides the technical capacity for that ‘real world’ interaction and mediation of identity and social relationships to be converted into media texts, an online social network and interactional data.

Over time, the interaction between the participatory culturally-embedded strategies of brands and the predictive capacities of social media lead to the development of a mode of branding that is responsive and customized. The creation and targeting of content is organized around variables like individual characteristics, sentiments, times of day, and location. The challenge for researchers, critics and policy-makers is that Facebook organises branding within networks and flows of communication that are difficult to observe and account for as part of public processes of analysis, debate and scrutiny.