ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a conceptual intervention in how people understand the role of media technologies in the marketing machinery of alcohol corporations. It connects current perspectives on branding and digital media to argue that alcohol brands operate as open-ended computational applications on digital media platforms. The chapter examines how alcohol brands leverage the capacity of media platforms to collect and process data to shape user engagement. It explores the role that real-world activations and material objects play in stimulating and organising brand engagement on media platforms. The chapter considers the expansion of 'below the line' forms of promotional labour and culture used by alcohol brands on media platforms. It offers regulatory interventions that might go beyond attempting to contain the content of brands and instead directly address the platform protocols, algorithms and interfaces that are the critical infrastructure of alcohol branding.
