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Abstract

This paper contextualizes and critically examines the incorporation of transactional features into two popular mobile social media apps: Instagram and Snapchat. It examines how mobile social media acts as an interface between culture and commerce. We situate this interface within a larger political economic context in which tech companies are embracing ‘fintech’ to drive growth. We argue that mobile social media platforms play a unique role in monetising personal data and context awareness through their development of ‘transactional affordance’ – a term we develop to understand new features allowing users to connect content to forms of payment. We argue that the success of these affordances is tied to labour associated with the ‘performative authenticity’ of social-media influencers. Our first case study examines the recent development of ‘shopping’ and ‘checkout’ features on Instagram, and the significance of this feature for the economic growth of parent company Facebook. We then look at how the specific development of augmented reality features on Snapchat serve as the basis for new transactional affordances in everyday contexts. We conclude the paper by arguing that the contextual commerce these phenomena entail signals a shift to a transactional culture in which everyday interactions become opportunities for consumption.

Keywords

apps Instagram mobile media payment technologies political economy of digital media Snapchat social media influencers

Introduction

When Joe’s Jeans dropped its latest collection on Monday, its second collaboration with influencer Danielle Bernstein of We Wore What, both collaborators watched in real-time as the sales rolled in. (Parisi, 2019)

Over the past few years, brand development and social media influencers (SMIs) have emerged as interconnected phenomena, reflecting the impact of digital media platforms on brand management (see, e.g. Hearn and Schoenhoff, 2016; Marwick, 2013). This convergence offers a window into how the performance of authenticity on social media is both contested and commercially exploited. We employ two concepts to demonstrate this dynamic: ‘performative authenticity’ (Knudsen and Waade, 2010; Shtern et al., 2019) and what we call ‘transactional affordances’. The former refers to social practices that are embraced by SMIs and, we argue, intensified by mobile social media apps. The latter describes new tech-enhanced capabilities that facilitate the exchange of money, typically through the purchase of a good or service. By critically examining the context bringing these phenomena together, we develop a political economic analysis of two mobile social media platforms, Snapchat and Instagram, as they increasingly incorporate ecommerce and financial tech (or ‘fintech’) capabilities. Informed by industry data and corporate communications, our analysis uses these case studies to understand apps as interfaces that merge culture and commerce.

These two ‘mobile-first’ apps are also compelling because their fierce competition for user attention and engagement reveals how new technical affordances enable the integration of culture and commerce. The consequences of this merger are not purely intellectual; it is a growing area of concern for regulators like the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which is currently working to regulate native advertising, promotion, and SMI content. For example, the FTC has highlighted SMIs and their circumvention of traditional laws governing the disclosure of advertising content or sponsored messaging (Lee, 2020). The expansion of ad spending within social media platforms, particularly related to SMIs, has raised fears about a new form of covert ‘payola’. A statement from the FTC notes the commercial appeal of exploiting the ‘authenticity’ of influencers in order to covertly promote ‘seemingly genuine grassroots endorsements or reviews’ (Chopra, 2020).

As noted, however, we are more broadly interested in how this phenomena intersects with the rise of transactional affordances on mobile apps such as Instagram and Snapchat. Psychologist James Gibson (1979) originally developed the concept of affordances to understand how animals (and humans) view objects in the world. More recently, Hutchby (2001a: 30) has outlined how ‘communicative affordances’ are ‘possibilities for action that emerge from the affordances of given technological forms’. The actions are not only informed by the construction or design of technologies, but are also contextual (user-dependent) and learned (social). As such, the concept of affordances avoids the limits of strict technological deterministic and fully social constructivist understandings of technologies (Hutchby, 2001b: 448). This concept also stacks nicely with Bratton’s (2014: 3) ‘app as interface’ framework, where apps connect ‘the single remote device to an ocean of data and brings that data to bear on the user’s immediate interests’.

We develop this line of analysis using two examples: (1) the recent development of ecommerce capabilities on Instagram allowing users to directly purchase items featured in Instagram posts and stories (Galligan, 2018); and (2), Snapchat’s Scan utility which, among other functions, enables users to take a photo of an object and buy it on Amazon (Constine, 2018). Through these examples, we outline the interrelationship between the circulation of cultural content online and the mobilisation of authenticity in order to produce transactional moments. In so doing, we demonstrate the overlap between communicative and transactional affordances within the app-as-interface.

Our examination begins with an overview of the concepts of transactional affordances and platform economies. Here, we provide a framework for understanding the ways that opportunities for commercial transactions are being integrated into an increasing number of platforms and contexts, particularly through mobile apps. We then demonstrate how these new monetisation strategies have emerged alongside SMIs or ‘microcelebrities’ whose value rests largely on their ability to perform authenticity for their social media audiences. The next two sections provide an overview of the new in-app shopping features on Instagram and Snapchat, focusing on how each represents an attempt to use the app-as-interface to weave together culture and commerce. The final section of the article links the influencer model, authenticity, mobile apps, and ecommerce to argue that these apps are accelerating the spread of a transactional culture built upon a capitalist logic of commoditisation.

Section 1: transactional affordances and platform economies

Digital platform companies have increasingly committed themselves to developing transactional capabilities that provide opportunities for ‘frictionless’ digital consumption within the attention economy of online platforms, linking market relations and communicative practices (Manzerolle and Wiseman, 2016: 393–394). Commercial interests have long wanted to be able to link advertising and point-of-purchase, to in effect create ‘shoppable’ media (McGuigan, 2018). However, an emerging set of transactional affordances are multiplying across digital platforms, including websites, apps, video games, and mobile devices. In these contexts, transactions can be considered both a contractual exchange (of goods, data, money and/or services), as well as a communicative process between two or more parties acting in a reciprocal relationship (see, e.g. Papazoglou, 2003).

The language of affordances, as Bucher and Helmond (2017: 242) argue, ‘locates affordances as part of communicative actions and can best be studied in and through the kinds of practices that technology allows for or constrains’. In the context of digital social media, a transactional affordance refers to how the technical features enabling an economic exchange are realized through the contextual awareness and opportunities for specific types of action afforded to individual users. These new consumer-focused affordances are symptomatic of wider logics in the operations of largely monopolistic digital platforms, which some refer to as ‘platform capitalism’ (see, e.g. Srnicek, 2017). The production of data – particularly transactional data and metadata – is increasingly a central business model of digital platforms (Maurer, 2014; O’Dwyer, 2019; Srnicek, 2017). The integration of granular contextual data helps better understand the link between commercial messaging and consumer behaviour. Since online advertising metrics have been highly contentious, with impressions and clicks not translating directly into a return on investment (ROI) for advertisers, there has been an increasing emphasis on transactions as an important monetisation threshold (Graham, 2019a).

In this manner, mobile apps, as expressions of platform economies (Daubs and Manzerolle, 2015), represent a beach head that allows market transactions to become context sensitive. Developments in mobile payment and digital currencies (see Maurer, 2012a, 2012b; O’Dwyer, 2019) have been a particular area of investment and research for both new tech-centred platform companies, as evidenced by Facebook’s recent attempts to launch its own cryptocurrency, Libra (Volpicelli, 2019), as well as for legacy industries like telecommunications and banking. The integration of transactional affordances is a key long-term growth strategy for almost all the major platform companies. We argue that what makes mobile-first or mobile-only apps such as Instagram and Snapchat an important site of critical analysis is their ability to exploit their context-awareness.

More generally, apps offer a personalized interface that draws together culture and commerce; in the case of SMIs, mobile apps are able to draw together a culture of performative authenticity and contextual consumerism. But the app is only the outer, visible layer of a highly complex assemblage of devices, platforms, networks, and databases. The app-as-interface connects to ‘the cloud’, where the ‘real’ app, its data, and all of the data processing necessary for it to function are housed, and thus where the movement of culture takes place. The purpose of the app-as-interface is to make data intelligible to users as information (Shedroff, 2001: 37), but only ‘according to the logics and limits of [underlying] programmability’ (Bratton, 2014: 3). Emerging transactional affordances provide a means by which financial networks (and data) interface with culture.

However, an important cultural intermediary is still required to capture user attention and, more importantly, trust. SMIs and micro-celebrities have emerged as a class of content producers valuable for precisely this ability. As we argue in the next section, the symbiotic relationship between SMIs and revenue hungry social media platforms depends upon their shared exploitation of performative authenticity as one element of a larger monetisation strategy. Although apps offer an ideal interface in which the production of culture and commerce are sutured together, technical features alone cannot drive the adoption of these capabilities. SMIs provide a cost-effective mechanism for funnelling users towards these new transactional affordances in an effort to remove, as one industry professional explained, ‘frictions in the buying journey’ (qtd. in Flora, 2020).

Section 2: the rise of SMIs and the monetisation of performative authenticity

Despite the unstructured emergence of SMIs, they offer an opportunity for critically interrogating the ways that culture and commerce are coiled together within digital platforms (Hund and McGuigan, 2019; Shtern et al., 2019). Understanding the specific economic or cultural impact that SMIs has proven more difficult. Facebook’s Instagram is widely considered to be the ‘biggest platform for influencer marketing’ (Fastenau, 2018), with one estimate identifying 500,000 SMIs on Instagram alone, comprising 39% of all accounts with more than 15,000 followers (Droesch, 2019). This number does not count the thousands of aspiring and emerging SMIs whose audiences have yet to reach a critical mass.

The economic and cultural significance of SMIs is also reflected in the emergence of dedicated management agencies focusing on standardising the service they provide to advertisers, sponsors, or the commercial platform that makes their content available. For example, the Heartbeat agency offers a full-service management platform for practicing and aspiring SMIs. Heartbeat’s tagline, ‘real people, real influence’, captures the essence of how culture and commerce are being monetized. As successful fashion SMI Danielle Bernstein, the influencer referenced in the epigraph of this paper, explains, ‘The reason that influencers are successful is because we represent real people’ (Sternlicht, 2019). The growing professionalisation of SMIs seems to undermine claims that SMIs offer some uniquely ‘authentic’ qualities that are different from other kinds of commercial sponsorship or messaging.

Dependent upon specific commercial platforms to develop their audiences, SMIs are also themselves part of the broader exploitation of user-generated content. Several scholars have detailed the ways social media platforms and advertisers ‘monetise’ online social interactions in support of a wider consumer culture. Fuchs (2012: 142), for example, has strongly critiqued the way Facebook ‘commodifies data and exploits users as well as the societal needs and desires underpinning information sharing on Facebook’. As he notes, users have become ‘content producers who engage in permanent creative activity, communication, community building, and content-production’ (Fuchs, 2012: 146). This activity allows users to become what Fuchs (2012: 146) calls ‘double objects of commodification’ as they ‘are first commodified by corporate platform operators, who sell them to advertising clients, and this results, second, in an intensified exposure to commodity logic’. As Wasko and Erickson (2009: 377) detail, advertisers and online platforms were originally stumped on how to translate growing online audiences into revenue.

However, pioneering partnership deals in the mid-to-late noughts, such as Cadbury Schweppes’ 2007 signing of then-Internet-sensation Tay Zonday, demonstrated the commercial possibilities of SMIs. Zonday’s homemade video for his song ‘Chocolate Rain’, which he posted to YouTube, had attracted over 13 million views at the time. As a part of his deal with Cadbury Schweppes, he reworked the song into ‘Cherry Chocolate Rain’ for use in an online-only campaign for Cherry Chocolate Dr. Pepper. That video attracted 2.5 million views on YouTube in January 2008 alone and was spread via other websites, allowing ‘the brand name to work for the company beyond paid advertising’ (Wasko and Erickson, 2009: 380–381). The lesson of this and other such partnerships and product placement deals was that, for advertisers, UGC was ‘not as desirable or valuable as professional media content from major companies, unless it can somehow be manipulated to make a profit’ (Wasko and Erickson, 2009: 383). In other words, advertisers were interested in the cultural ‘value’ of UGC only insofar as it was able to attract a potentially valuable audience.

Though unusual for the time, Zonday’s deal makes him a prototype of the contemporary SMI. Brands, in an effort to stand out in a cluttered digital ad space, are capitalising upon the strong personal connections that SMIs attempt to generate with their followers. Some SMIs benefit monetarily through partnerships with brand sponsors (Duffy, 2017: 6) or by translating popularity into support for personal business ventures and partnerships (Backaler, 2018: 127).

Danielle Bernstein represents the current state of SMIs. Starting with the fashion blog WeWoreWhat, she has built a massive social media following, particularly on Instagram where she has 2.4 million followers and earns roughly $15 k per branded post (Sternlicht, 2019). She has participated in several successful brand partnerships using her social media audience to drive purchases (Parisi, 2019). Bernstein is also significant because of the role she is playing to legitimize influencers as a new creative workforce. Her tech company, Moe Assist, is creating a ‘one-stop management suite for Instagram influencers with tools like invoicing, campaign management, content and hashtag inventory and more’ which she claims offers the ‘next step in legitimising the entire influencer industry’ (Sternlicht, 2019). Her tech venture is designed to provide a new level of professionalisation, while signalling the development of a more coherent yet highly exploitable creative labour force, is at the same time undercutting their perceived authenticity as ‘real people’.

The seeming contradiction between professionalisation and authenticity, mirroring a tension between the cultural and economic significance of SMIs, may also explain why increasingly smaller audiences may be more effective and potentially valuable. So-called ‘micro’ influencers are a significant segment of SMIs, because of their ability to build relatively small audiences with higher levels of trust. Adweek notes that micro-influencers usually have a higher engagement rate, where engagement rates typically decline as audiences get bigger (Main, 2017).

As we discuss in the next section, Sephora is taking specific advantage of Instagram’s newly developed transactional affordance, ‘Checkout on Instagram’ (Murphy, 2020). The core economic value of contemporary SMIs, irrespective of audience size, is the potential to convert personality or ‘authenticity’ (real or perceived) into ‘some “thing” intrinsic to the individual and configures it as their property, which can then be subject to market exchange’ (Hearn and Schoenhoff, 2016: 198). The perception of ‘authenticity’ is key; the popularity necessary to develop enough followers to be appealing to brands is dependent upon the public perception that SMIs are ‘just like us’ (Duffy, 2017: 3), which makes SMIs more relatable therefore trustworthy. That relatability is generated through aesthetic and performative tactics. As Banet-Weiser (2012: 80) argues: ‘To craft a successful self-brand, one not only has to brand oneself as authentic but literally has to be authentic’.

The perceived authenticity of SMIs is thus highly constructed as a ‘persistent performance of sentiment’ (Duffy and Wissinger, 2017: 4658), or what Pooley called a ‘calculated authenticity’ that becomes ‘a means to the end of self-promotion’ (cited in Duffy and Wissinger, 2017: 4659). Instagram influencers’ self-branding activities thus subvert Instagram’s intended function to act as ‘a personal nostalgic archive’ of memories and spontaneously captured moments (Abidin, 2016: 7). Performative authenticity furthers the logic of calculated authenticity; through notions of authenticity and ‘candid’ – but, really, highly rehearsed and posed – photos and selfies, SMIs convey an intimacy that constitutes the basis of their relationship with followers (Marwick, 2015: 139). In turn, the strength and loyalty of these relationships are the basis for SMI’s promotional efforts (and thus revenue streams), since ‘consumers are more likely to believe in the authenticity of a claim made by a personal acquaintance than one made by a rich celebrity’ (Hearn and Schoenhoff, 2016: 203).

SMIs are able to straddle the line between friend and celebrity. As one brand representative for Old Navy noted: ‘Promoting content directly from an influencer’s handle inherently gives the post more authenticity than coming from a brand handle, and we’re seeing significantly higher engagement rates using this strategy’ (qtd. in Graham, 2019b). To summarise, it is not necessarily the popularity of SMIs that determines their value; it is their perceived authenticity that makes them an important funnel that guides users towards purchasing behaviour and sustains the transactional affordances of a given platform. Yet, as we have indicated, this performance is always in tension with growing regulatory oversight and industry professionalisation.

SMIs, through their ability to engage in performative authenticity, offer a means to both build trust and then leverage that trust in service of commercial messages. SMIs, whose stock and trade is building relationships of trust with their audience, might serve as critical agents paving the road to the friction free commercial exchanges enabled by new, especially mobile, transactional affordances. The colonisation of transactional affordances within mobile apps is perhaps best illustrated by two popular social media applications: Instagram and Snapchat. In the following sections, we offer a brief overview of these mobile app features, which have the potential to turn every personal message and social interaction into an opportunity for consumerism. Our goal here is to situate the underlying logic of expanding transactional affordances and performative authenticity as expressions of the ‘app-as-interface’ framework outlined above.

Section 3: checkout on Instagram

Perhaps no other app captures the search for a seamless interface between culture and commerce than Facebook’s key acquisition: Instagram. While Facebook’s social network platform continues to gain international scrutiny from policymakers and consumer advocates (see Hughes, 2019), its parent company is planning to increasingly rely on Instagram as key source of revenue (Frier and Wittenstein, 2018). Facebook’s 2019 fourth quarter advertising revenue was US$20.7 billion and, although the company does not distinguish its ad revenue by platform, it did state that 94% of its revenue came from mobile advertising (Williams, 2020). For example, a large portion of recent growth comes from the paid ‘stories’ which are used on Facebook, but primarily associated as an Instagram feature (Gesenhues, 2019). A relatively new feature, ‘stories’ are a tool professional influencers have embraced in order to facilitate a certain kind of performative authenticity (e.g. candid videos of everyday life) (Cohen, 2019a). Instagram is a centrepiece of Facebook’s future business plan as it begins to outstrip the advertising revenue generated by the company’s flagship social networking platform. One explanation for this is that Instagram’s brand is arguably more popular and trustworthy than its corporate parent (Guynn, 2018). As a visual content sharing platform, it optimises static or short form content that can be quickly consumed, making it a prime site for the commercial logics of attention capture (Wu, 2017).

SMIs are effectively operating within an ‘attention economy’, which is ‘a marketing perspective assigning value according to something’s capacity to attract “eyeballs” in a media-saturated, information-rich world’ (Marwick, 2015: 138). In order to better control and monetize the data produced on its platform, Instagram has recently been testing a ‘like’ ban whereby the number of likes a given post has is hidden to all users except the original poster. CNBC reporter Graham (2019a) suggests that this change will likely alter how SMIs operate, minimising ‘vanity metrics’ such as likes or follower counts and shifting instead to ‘a focus on actual sales’. This shift will put increased emphasis on authenticity as a means to funnelling users into opportunities for economic transactions.

Along with brands colonising Instagram’s news feeds, the platform is now looking to ‘close the loop’ between promotional messaging and consumption behaviour with a more direct embrace of ecommerce. First, Instagram announced in early 2019 that it was integrating a native payment feature into its mobile app called ‘Checkout on Instagram’ (Instagram, 2019). A year later, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, Facebook launched a dedicated shopping feature that allows ‘personalized recommendations, exclusive offers and other features, Instagram Shop can also spur a sense of immediacy among shoppers and drive repeat business for merchants’ (Williams, 2020). With Instagram Shop, ‘Sellers can create collections and tag products in their posts that point to a checkout function within the app, removing a friction point with the planned integration with Facebook Pay’ (Williams, 2020: emphasis added).

The introduction of these ecommerce features (Checkout and Shop) represents just the latest attempt to integrate shopping experiences into the social network and to create a form of revenue generating ‘shoppertainment’ (Tsou, 2020). Tech journalist Heathman (2019) notes that Instagram ‘wants to be the shop window of the internet’, and in-app purchases have been a key focus for Instagram since 2018. Instagram is positioning itself to be an all-purpose ecommerce platform that can ‘encompass small-town boutiques to high-end, international brands’ (Wynne, 2020). Indeed, the new CEO of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, told the Financial Times that his long-term plan for the company was to cultivate more ‘window shopping’ on the platform, and to establish links ‘between shoppers, sellers and the app’s huge number of influencers’ (qtd. in Murphy, 2019). Mosseri’s goal of using native payment features to ‘unlock value’ buried within the relationships between SMIs and users is part of a larger vision to make Instagram competitive with e-commerce giants Amazon and Alibaba (Murphy, 2019). This move would involve exploiting the social and cultural dimensions of the platform by connecting it to purchasing behaviour.

Facebook executives are no longer shy about revealing how its multiple platforms are being groomed to incorporate transactional affordances of various kinds. At a 2020 marketing industry panel discussing how authenticity could be used to drive purchasing behaviours, a Facebook executive explained, ‘what we’re going to be doing is enabling every possible surface that we can to be completely shoppable and to leverage all of our infrastructure to drive conversions’ (Adams, 2020). The development of Instagram’s native payment capability follows Instagram’s prior attempts to develop e-commerce features. The platform previously developed a ‘shoppable’ feature where retailers can tag products in photos, allowing users to tap and select products to view in-app information including a product description, price, additional photos, and, of course, a ‘Shop Now’ button which will allow users to purchase the product by redirecting users to their mobile Web browser (Constine, 2016). Instagram has since integrated a dedicated ‘Shop’ button into its mobile app user interface. More specifically, retailers can capitalise on the loyal audiences created by influencers because they ‘will be able to tag specific products in their photos’, then ‘[u]sers can click a photo, see exactly what’s for sale, and purchase the product – all without ever leaving Instagram’ Lorenz (2019). Shoppable ads are significantly incentivised as they can create a funnel from consumer attention and engagement to payment/exchange (Daly, 2019). Under this model, however, influencers who tag products do not receive any financial benefit (Lorenz, 2019); they merely act as ‘nodes’ that channel user attention to external purchasing opportunities.

Instagram’s initial trial of this payment feature was used to support high profile or prestigious brands such as Nike, Burberry, and Prada. As part of the payment system, Instagram will charge a fee for each transaction as a ‘selling fee’ (Wagner, 2019). Instagram uses these transactional features to help solidify itself as a premium’ shopping space that optimizes the voyeuristic joys of ‘window shopping’, while minimising the barriers or ‘frictions’ of commerce. Vox Senior Editor Wagner (2019) notes: ‘The idea is simple: The fewer steps it takes to complete a purchase, the more likely people will complete the process’. The native payment features serve to eliminate an otherwise ‘complex purchase flow’ (Adams, 2020). Instagram’s Director of Business and Monetization Product Marketing, Susan Rose, directly references the idea of limiting ‘friction’ from transactions, explaining, ‘Ultimately, we want to remove friction from all pieces of the shopping journey, and anywhere where people and businesses might engage on Instagram’ (qtd. in PYMNTS, 2018).

As of July 2020, amidst the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, Instagram is becoming a crucial ecommerce platform, with many brands now using the transactional affordances of the platform to launch entire storefronts, such as Sephora (Murphy, 2020). Users’ experiences with SMIs have paved the way for this integration. Not only are Instagram users accustomed to seeing ads pop up in their feeds, but they are also accustomed to watching influencers and brands they follow advertise or recommend products. This added level of trust, which hinges on the perceived authenticity of SMIs, plays off the ‘social’ aspect of the social network and personalizes the advertising experience. In short, as a new component of the virtual shopping experience, the Checkout on Instagram Feature is designed to ‘help the social media platform become a more attractive place for consumers to buy retail products, and to capture more sales via what is coming to be known as contextual commerce’ (PYMNTS, 2019).

Section 4: augmented reality and Snapchat scan

While Instagram is dedicated to enhancing the window shopping-like dynamic of the platform and enabling businesses to reduce friction from transactions, Snapchat is leveraging its mobile experience and extensive Augmented Reality (AR) features to turn every space and social interaction into a potential storefront. In AR, ‘artificial textual annotation of the world is fused with direct perception’ (Bratton, 2014: 3). Since 2014, Snap Inc. (Snap), the parent company of Snapchat, has invested heavily in intellectual property (IP) related to AR and has ‘quietly been building an ecosystem of AR experiences within its messaging app’ (Sumra, 2018). The discussion of these ‘AR experiences’ in this section demonstrates the commercialisation of AR and, more specifically, how Snap is leveraging AR to integrate transactional affordances on its mobile social media.

Snapchat Lenses, an in-app feature which layers graphics and designs over real-world objects when viewed through a smartphone’s camera, are the most popular and visible of these AR experiences. Snap encourages users to create their own AR Lenses with a software package called Lens Studio, which Snap makes available for free via their website (Snap Inc., n.d.-a). As of May 2020, Snapchat users had created over 600,000 such AR Lenses (AR Insider, 2020). The company does not profit from the creation of use of these user-generated Lenses. However, Snap does benefit indirectly from the unpaid material labour these Lens creators provide, namely in the form of a more attractive user experience which helps grow Snapchat’s user base, and increased user engagement which ‘attracts brand advertisers to Snapchat’s AR revenue driver: sponsored lenses’ (AR Insider, 2020). Snapchat earned an estimated US$1.114 billion from AR-based advertising in 2019, reinforcing the social media platform’s belief that AR is ‘a core part of its business as a camera company’ (AR Insider, 2020).

Many of these Lenses are designed to augment faces, similar to those featured in other apps such as Instagram. However, Lens Studio is becoming increasingly sophisticated; Lens Studio 3.0, released in 2019, incorporates ‘a host of new AR features, including hand, body and pet tracking’ (Cohen, 2019b), as well as the ability to recognise facial expressions and gestures (Snap Inc., 2020a). Other AR features on Snapchat, however, interact with environments, something that helps differentiate it from rivals such as Instagram. As TechCrunch Editor-At-Large Josh Constine notes, ‘Instagram Stories might have 500 million daily users, but they’re mostly applying AR to their faces, not to interact with the world’ (Constine, 2019). He elaborates using the example of Snapchat’s Landmarkers feature, which layers animated AR transformations over famous places such as the Eiffel Tower or the Flatiron Building in New York City (Constine, 2019). Other lenses can interact with objects in a user’s space: ‘If you view a $10 bill, Hamilton will come alive and sing a song from the musical’ (Constine, 2019). These Lenses that interact with the environment demonstrate how the Snapchat app is ‘also an interface between the user and his habitat’ (Bratton, 2014: 3).

At the heart of this feature is ‘Snapchat Scan’. This search capability, which Snap slowly rolled out to users in the United States starting in 2018, was originally called ‘Visual Search’ the Scan utility was acquired through the purchase of the tech startup company Scan.me and originally used to interact with Snap’s ‘QR Snapcodes’ that helped people add new friends or unlock new Lenses (Constine, 2019). A new Scan button was included, along with Lenses, as a part of the app’s ‘AR Bar’, which was added in 2019 to make it easier to access Snapchat’s growing AR offerings (Palladino, 2020). Users can access the Scan function via this AR Bar or simply by pressing and holding on the app’s camera button (Constine, 2016). Some of Scan’s capabilities are more functional conveniences than creative or artistic expressions, such as the ability to identify dog breeds or plant species (Leskin, 2020). Many of Scan’s features are possible thanks to partnerships with other apps and companies. For example, users can access Scan to identify a song and its artist through an agreement with the popular music app Shazam. A partnership with Photomath allows users to ‘point the camera at math equations and have them instantly solved’ or, thanks to a partnership with the popular animated GIF provider Giphy, ‘point the camera at a wide variety of real-world scenes and objects and have gif suggestions pop up’ using object recognition (Palladino, 2020).

Snapchat’s environmental AR Lenses that incorporate object recognition features also make it easier to integrate e-commerce opportunities and transactional affordances. One of these opportunities is again the result of a corporate partnership, this time between Snap and online retail giant Amazon initiated in 2018 (Team Snap, 2018). Users simply open the Snapchat app, point the camera at an object or barcode, then activate Scan. Using a combination of ‘computer vision and AI’ (AR Insider, 2020), the Snapchat app accesses Amazon’s ‘machine vision tech’, which ‘recognizes logos, artwork, package covers or other unique identifying marks to find the product’ (Constine, 2018). Once identified, a pop-up window displays current product information and pricing on Amazon. If the user selects one of the displayed options, they are then taken to the product page in the Amazon mobile app or, if that app is not installed, the same page in the phone’s mobile Web browser. In short, with the Scan AR feature, product information is layered on top of ‘real world’ images, giving users the opportunity to complete a purchase from Amazon from within the Snapchat app.

Bratton (2014: 3) argues that an AR app ‘renders the environment for the user, and the user for the environment, according to the logics and limits of that programmability’. In the case of Snapchat Scan, the app, coupled with its mobile character, makes it possible to convert any physical location into a virtual shopping centre. The Amazon-powered object recognition functionality similarly offers the user a transactional affordance, namely one that frames any recognised object in a user’s environment into a product for consumption. Other partnerships provide additional transactional affordances; in June, 2020, Snap announced a partnership with the development company Wannaby to develop a ‘a downloadable foot tracking template that allows you to create fun Lenses that interact with your feet’, exemplified by the ability to create ‘realistic shoe try-on Lenses’ (Snap Inc., 2020b). It is easy to imagine someone combining these features to provide users with a series of related transactional affordances: the ability to see and scan an object while out and about, virtually try it on via a downloadable Snapchat Lens, then purchase the product from Amazon, all without ever leaving the Snapchat app. If an app is ‘the aperture through which the cloud redraws the city’ as Bratton (2014: 8) argues, then Snapchat redraws the city – or any space into which one enters with their mobile device – into a site of endless and increasingly frictionless consumption opportunities.

Scan’s transactional affordances also contribute to the development and naturalisation of a more entrenched transactional culture. Bratton’s discussion of AR apps is illustrative in this regard. He argues that the app-as-interface not only ‘redraws’ spaces, but also transforms a physical environment into a ‘designable instrumental frame by the use of various techniques’ including ‘the overlaying of iconic GUI menus upon real-world systems’ (Bratton, 2014: 11). A result of this framing is that the material world is ‘rendered as interactive narrative’ (Bratton, 2014: 11). While the interactive elements give the user a sense of control over that narrative, Bratton (2014: 11) stipulates that ‘[t]he ultimate effect of that programming is to transform these semiotic technologies into a direct ideological, even theological, articulations of the inhabited landscape’. Snapchat’s AR Scan feature reflects Bratton’s (2014: 12) assertion that ‘AR is where the microtargeting business models of cognitive capitalism melt into the choreography of the mobile user-subject’. With Scan, Snap is leveraging the transactional affordances of both AR and the authenticity enabled by platforms such as Instagram, but in a way that relies less on the ‘performative authenticity’ of SMIs and more on the ‘native’ authenticity of the user’s environmental and interpersonal interactions.

By capitalising on the authenticity of everyday interactions and naturalising transactional culture, Snapchat Scan also offers the platform, product makers, and Amazon transactional affordances as well, namely the opportunity to benefit from turning every user interaction into a potential advertising or sales opportunity. This potential highlights how considerations of ‘shopability’ are driving these AR features which are key to the Snap-Amazon relationship. Although the specific financial details of the Snap-Amazon partnership are unknown (Constine, 2018; Sloane, 2018c), the partnership makes economic sense for both parties. Snap, for example, has experienced a number of financial difficulties since its inception. After an initial public offering (IPO) in March 2017 saw the company valued at US$31 billion, its net worth fluctuated between US$8 billion and US$15 billion, dipping to roughly US$13.5 billion in March 2020 before steading growing again during the second quarter to reach a high of US$33.2 billion at the end of June (CNBC, 2020). In addition to financial issues, Snapchat has had issues maintaining its user base (Ghosh and Morgan, 2019). The combination of these factors led New York University professor Scott Galloway (qtd. in Bloom, 2018) to claim that ‘Snap needs something’ to avoid going out of business before the end of 2019 (emphasis in original). Obviously, that closing did not happen; Snap’s leveraging of AR and Scan, and the transactional affordances these features provide has been one strategy the company has used to appease its investors.

The appeal of these transactional affordances to Amazon is not surprising considering Snap’s user base, which, despite previous issues, numbered 218 million daily active users in 2019, an increase of 17% over the previous year (Snap Inc., 2020c). In addition, Snap’s CEO Evan Spiegel announced in 2019 that the app was used by nearly 75% of 13–34 year olds in the United States, 90% of US-based 13–24 year olds, and ‘more 13 to 24-year-olds than Facebook or Instagram in the United States, the U.K., France, Canada and Australia’ (Constine, 2019). This is a lucrative consumer base, as ‘studies show Snap users are 20% more likely to make mobile purchases and 60% more likely to make impulse purchases’ (Newman, 2018).

The Snapchat app is now in large part defined by its incorporation of AR. Snap’s Lenses and Scan functionality encourage users to view and augment social interactions and everyday environments through AR, and Scan’s transactional affordances ease the transition of Snapchat’s users to consumers. There is evidence that Snap has been planning this kind of integration for some time; three of the executives listed in Snap’s 2019 Annual Report were Amazon executives until 2018 when they joined Snapchat. Furthermore, Scan is merely one of a suite of features that offer transactional affordances. Before the addition of Scan, Snap launched a purchasing-based initiative called the ‘Shoppable Snap Ad’ which ‘shows multiple products in a carousel of images’ through which users can browse and make purchases (Sloane, 2018a), and AR ads that ‘blend selfies with commerce’ by including ‘a button that leads to a shopping page, an app-install page, a video or a website without leaving Snapchat’ (Sloane, 2018b), indicating an emphasis on removing friction from purchase opportunities. Snap specifically frames Scan and Lenses as advertising tools that can ‘close the gap between you and your customers’ (Snap Inc., n.d.b), and companies from Budweiser to BMW have test-driven Snap’s AR Lenses as an advertising tool (Chen, 2017).

Although these features are relatively new to Snapchat, it is worth noting that they essentially replicate features that have ‘been a staple in Chinese e-commerce apps Taobao and Tmall since 2014’ and are ‘helpful especially when users are searching for an item where they have no knowledge of the name or brand’ (Soo, 2018). Peng and Wang (2020: 2) relatedly discuss increasingly common ‘microtransactions’ on the popular social networking and messaging app Weixin or WeChat, which they define as transactions that ‘mainly occur between existing familiars (shu ren) in China (such as families, friends and neighbors)’. Just as Snapchat’s features conflate social and transactional interactions, Peng and Wang (2020: 6) argue that microcommerce on Weixin/WeChat ‘relies on the interpersonal relations and personal networks of the users (trader and sellers) to facilitate the financial transactions and the product/services provisions’. The existence of these dynamics and features on Taobao, Tmall, and Weixin/WeChat demonstrate that the development of transactional affordances on online platforms is a global phenomenon. What Snap’s partnership with Amazon adds to this longer historical and international development is the interconnection between economic and cultural implications within mobile media platforms more generally – creating a situation in which every person may become an influencer just by virtue of being on a platform with embedded transactional affordances.

Section 5: conclusion: realising contextual commerce

While our article captures technical and financial developments that may prove transitory, it provides a snapshot of the way that culture and commerce are articulated within mobile apps. Our goal is to draw out the specific set of conditions within which financial transactions are developed within mobile social media. Snapchat and Instagram are primarily mobile app platforms; they are designed to be ubiquitous, making them ideal payment platforms. The publicly-traded corporations that govern these platforms have realized this, each attempting to leverage their user-base and the platform itself to make mobile, contextual shopping more fluid, overcoming barriers in user experience (UX) and payment that have previously restricted the use of mobile technologies as a shopping and purchasing platform in Western countries where mobile ecommerce has not fully matured.

To conclude, we want to discuss a recent mobile marketing concept that captures the logics of commercial exploitation we have already outlined, but also captures the wider marketing imaginary as it reckons with the transactional affordances emerging within social media. ‘Contextual commerce’ refers to the ‘ability to discover a product or service and buy without redirection’ (PYMNTS, 2018: 2). As an affordance necessary to facilitate contextual commerce, one industry analyst noted, ‘Putting a buy button at the moment of discovery is a game changer’ (qtd. in Daly, 2019). Merging the moment of discovery and the purchasing opportunity and incorporating in-app payment opportunities create the potential for a truly ‘shoppable life’ (Hund and McGuigan, 2019).

Contextual commerce realises the potential of social media to act as the newest tool in maintaining the hegemony of consumer capitalism, not only as a political economic reality, but as a set of affordances and behavioural or cognitive impulses. Media theorist Innis (1991 [1951]) warned that our dominant media shape our habits of mind; media that, for example, facilitated the expansion of the price system and market relations intensify a ‘present mindedness’ that would, if left unchecked, be increasingly difficult to reverse. An uncharacteristically critical comment from an industry report on contextual commerce, for example, notes that some consumers ‘fear that making the buying process too easy will encourage them to purchase products they didn’t need’ (PYMNTS and Braintree, 2018: 6).

While the benefits this impulsive behaviour offers to consumer capitalism may be obvious, we are only now beginning to see the wider political and cultural implications. An important element of contextual commerce is understanding ‘context’ as a function of the spatio-temporal embeddedness of culture. By capitalising on interpersonal relationships and converting individual interests into consumable products, these apps demonstrate a prevalence of transactional affordances that merges frictionless consumption, the attention economy, and the circulation of culture, trends and products via mobile-based social media applications, hence: a pervasive transactional culture.

Footnotes

The authors would like to thank Kyle Asquith,Lee McGuigan,and Kathleen Kuehn for their their insights and generous feedback in the development of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Vincent Manzerolle

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