ABSTRACT
This chapter turns to interviews with marketing professionals and describes their complex and contradictory responses to upgrade culture in marketing work. It highlights their personal stories and accounts of upgrade culture’s reskilling in creative production, reshaping campaign design to be data-driven, and reorienting marketers’ long-standing anxieties over the value of their work toward seeking solutions in emerging technologies. First, creative producers in marketing once used hand skills and highly specialized equipment to design and edit promotional materials. As PCs, software, and other consumer electronics integrated into marketing work, they compelled constant reskilling to keep up with new software and hardware tools, which centralized power with the tech industry. Second, the introduction of digital devices into marketing work also gave marketers access to cheap data about audience behavior that reshaped campaign design to be data-driven. Whereas marketers previously designed campaigns around communication goals and creative design, emerging technologies gave smaller marketers access to data that was previously unattainable. Finally, upgrade culture frames the next new technology as the one that will finally prove the value of their work.
