Literature Review

At the beginning of this project, I was simply looking at how the beauty community online has changed it's targeted audience and began advertising differently for themselves. Within some of the research done, I have discovered that this looks familiar in the sense of gift giving. What the data has shown within the tweets and quick five minute ads at the beginning of a YouTube video is that the idea of changing the way makeup artist Jeffree Star advertises went from a familiar "buy my product please" to "anyone experiencing issues during the corona virus, look to me for help" in exchange for views. The idea that the advertising for many brands has changed is very obvious in a pandemic like this, but to see a commonality between the change in advertising to gift giving and gift exchange is something I was not expecting to see.

Gift giving, a practice that has lived within our culture for years has never gone away but has found a way to disguise itself much better in plain sight. We can go back to many instances in which the practice of gift giving and gift receiving played a large role in our lives for example, think back to the days in which school forced children to bring a valentines day card and candy to every student in the class. This was to be fair to all the students and to make sure there is no favoritism but is that the way the world really works? We see everyday that it is not true. Recruiters for sports are a good example of this. The recruiter could have an eye for one player and offer them a gift in exchange for their talents. This is of course a simple example of how gift giving works today. We can connect this exact same idea to Jeffree Star and his business through online interactions. Not  only can we make the connections to see how others would react when being offered a gift, we can evaluate how this is in fact a business tactic to receive subconscious trust from the audience which in the long run leads to more followers as well as a potential increase in product sales. Gift giving, in the light of advertising tactics is not something we as a culture would like to think about because it makes us vulnerable but it is exactly what happens every time we see a post that goes something like this: "At noon today I am giving away $200 dollars and a custom Jeffree Star hand mirror to three lucky people in need due to the corona virus!! All you have to do is follow my Twitter, comment on my last YouTube video and like this post to be entered!!". This happens almost  everyday on some platforms.

How we analyze some of the data being collected is important because of the inconsistency within the account. Trying to find a pattern that this specific individual makes within the daily Tweets is difficult and sporadic but manageable. Since the main focus of the topic (seeing how the advertising angle has changed from simple advertising to gift giving) has only changed within the last month or so, we can only evaluate from a few weeks before the outbreak of COVID-19 to properly see how advertising was distributed before the vulnerability of the people occurred. Without the analysis of the data prior to the outbreak, we really have nothing to compare the new set of data to. Although this experiment would be better conducted if we could see the before, during and after parts of this process, we are not granted with that luxury of time so it will have to be a much more direct process.