OSP: Marcus Rashford CSP

Our OSP CSP is the online presence of Manchester Utd and England footballer Marcus Rashford.

This is an in-depth CSP so we need to study all four areas of the theoretical framework: Language, Representation, Audience and Industry. This first case study will focus on Language and Representation.

Introduction

Marcus Rashford is a Manchester Utd and England footballer who has used social media and the internet to create a strong brand. He has been praised for his high-profile campaigns on food poverty (putting pressure on the government to provide free school meals in holidays during Covid-19) as well as homelessness and books for children. 

We need to study his website, social media and how he has created his Marcus Rashford brand. 

Language analysis

GLOW glossary words

Convergence: When two or more media forms can be accessed in one place or one device e.g Marcus Rashford’s website also links to his books, social media feeds and video content. 

Online engagement/dialogue: Communication online e.g between a celebrity and a fan. 

Endorsement: When a celebrity or influential figure recommends something to the public. 

Website conventions

Website key conventions include:

• Logo/brand identity
• Navigation – menus
• Central image
• Multimedia features – e.g. video 
• Social media links / integration

Social media conventions

Social media key conventions include:

• Logo/brand identity
• Bio (personal details/information)
• Profile image
• Background/banner image
• Images and video
• Online engagement/audience interaction

Genre and narrative

Marcus Rashford has created a strong personal brand that merges different genres – footballer, campaigner / activist, influencer and celebrity.

His online presence – particularly video content – emphasises his working class background, how hard his mum worked as a single parent and his own positive attitude towards hard work. This creates a narrative of success against the odds. He then uses this to drive his campaigning work on food poverty and reading as well as his commercial endorsements.

Representations

Marcus Rashford’s online presence offers a real mix of representations – some reinforcing stereotypes of masculinity, footballers and race/ethnicity but at other points subverting them. 

He also looks to challenge stereotypes regarding poverty, age, people receiving benefits and social class.

Use Daniel Chandler’s representation theory of CAGE to analyse Marcus Rashford’s online presence:

• C – Class (social class – working class people)
• A – Age (youth)
• G – Gender (masculinity)
• E – Ethnicity (black British)

Audience

Target audience: demographics and psychographics

What is Marcus Rashford’s target audience: 

• Demographics: CAGE?
• Psychographics?

Audience engagement

Instagram engagement rate is a measure of how much audiences engage with posts (e.g. likes, comments). An engagement rate of 1-3% is considered good and anything 6%+ is extremely high.

Marcus Rashford’s power as an influencer is shown by his engagement rate of 6%.

Source: https://starngage.com/app/gb/influencers/marcusrashford

Marcus Rashford's appeal to audiences

What is the appeal of Marcus Rashford to his audience? Think about his campaigns, use of social media and his website. Also, consider his appeal to different audiences.

Use Blumler and Katz Uses and Gratifications theory:

• Diversion
• Personal Identity
• Personal Relationships
• Surveillance/information

Industry

Marcus Rashford net worth

Marcus Rashford’s net worth has been estimated at around £16m (source: Sunday Times rich list). This includes:

• £200,000 per week from Manchester United (£10.4m a year)
• £2m endorsement deal with Nike
• Additional deals with Burberry, BT Sport (now TNT Sport), Coca-Cola and others

He is also the youngest person to top the Sunday Times Giving List for raising £20m for good causes.

Marcus Rashford commercial partners

Watch the following promotional videos from brands featuring Marcus Rashford.

• What do the companies get from an association with Rashford?
• Thinking about media language, how do these adverts create an emotional connection between the brand and audience using Marcus Rashford? 
• How do the clips help Marcus Rashford control or build his own brand?

Industries: ownership, control and regulation

Marcus Rashford’s online presence is partly driven by his excellent use of social media.

But who owns Twitter? Who owns Instagram? How much money do they make? How are they regulated?

These are key questions for GCSE Media students.

Twitter

• Twitter was started by Jack Dorsey in 2006. It now has over 200 million active users worldwide. 
• Twitter’s 2020 revenue was $3.72 billion. 
• Twitter makes most of its money through advertising – promoted tweets or ‘trend takeovers’.
• Marcus Rashford has over 5m Twitter followers.

Instagram

• Instagram is an image and video sharing site launched in 2010. 
• In 2012 it was bought by Facebook for $1 billion. Facebook and Instagram’s parent company is now called Meta – a global conglomerate.
• Instagram has over a billion active users worldwide and more than 25 million users in the UK alone.
• Instagram revenue in 2020 was $24 BILLION.
• Marcus Rashford has over 12m Instagram followers.

Instagram: a danger to teenagers?

• Over 40% of Instagram users are aged under 23.
• Research suggests that Instagram is damaging to mental health – particularly for teenage girls.
• Facebook’s own research suggested this – but they allegedly kept this secret.
• The research suggested one in three girls felt bad about their bodies and Instagram made this worse. It is also linked to increased anxiety and depression.

Media regulation: how do you regulate the internet and social media?

The government put forward the Online Safety bill in 2022 to change the law and add regulation of the internet to Ofcom’s role as media regulator. This includes:

• Sending threatening posts being punishable by jail sentences.
• Platforms like Twitter and Instagram having to actively prevent users seeing harmful material – or risk being fined by Ofcom.
• Platforms paying Ofcom to regulate their content.

Critics of the law have suggested social media is impossible to regulate – there is too much content – or users’ freedom of speech will be compromised.

Internet regulation: key questions

The internet is very difficult to regulate because it is global but governments are national. Also, corporations like Amazon or Facebook are now more powerful than some governments.

Media theorist Clay Shirky describes the change with digital media as going from: “Filter then publish to publish then filter”. 

Anyone can publish almost anything instantly and the audience then has to filter the content they engage with.

Here's Clay Shirky talking about how the internet is changing communication - watch the first three minutes:

Finally, here is Marcus Rashford talking to Sky Sports News about what should be done about online abuse: 

Blog tasks: Marcus Rashford CSP

Work through the following tasks to cover our Marcus Rashford CSP:

Language

1) Make two lists - one of website conventions used on Marcus Rashford's official website and one of social media conventions found on Rashford's Twitter or Instagram pages. 

2) How does his website promote the Marcus Rashford brand?

3) What connotations can be be found in the homepage for Marcus Rashford's website (you can mention either the old or new homepage)?

4) How does Marcus Rashford use his social media profiles to promote his brand and campaigns? Give at least three examples of different posts / images / design from his social media. 

5) How does Marcus Rashford's online presence use the narrative of his childhood upbringing to create a positive brand identity?

Representations

1) How does Rashford use different aspects of mise-en-scene (e.g. clothes/costume) to create very different representations of himself on his own website?

2) What representations of football or footballers can you find in Marcus Rashford's online presence? Does it reinforce or subvert traditional stereotypes of footballers?

3) What examples can you find of website pages, social media posts or aspects of the brand that create a positive representation of Marcus Rashford? You may wish to comment on his discussion of family or his campaigns - his page on the FareShare campaign website may help with this question.

4) What representations of masculinity can you find in Marcus Rashford's online presence? Does this reinforce or challenge traditional gender stereotypes?

5) What representations of race/ethnicity can you find in his website or social media? Does this reinforce or challenge media stereotypes? 

Audience

1) Who are the potential target audiences for Marcus Rashford's online content? Try and cover both demographics and psychographics.

2) Marcus Rashford’s online presence is partly driven by his excellent use of social media. How does he use social media to engage with his fans and make them feel part of his brand?

3) What is Marcus Rashford's Instagram engagement rate and what does this tell us? 

4) Go to Marcus Rashford's Twitter or Instagram account. Find and screenshot/link three tweets/posts that show the different aspects of his brand e.g. Relatable person (normal, down to earth), Campaigner (interested in politics), Celebrity footballer (e.g. awards ceremony or fashion).

5) What audience pleasures are provided by Marcus Rashford's online presence? Try and apply Blumler and Katz's Uses and Gratifications theory here.

6) Applying Stuart Hall's Reception theory, what would a preferred and oppositional reading of Marcus Rashford's online presence be?

• Preferred reading (people who support Marcus Rashford): 
• Oppositional reading (people who criticise Marcus Rashford): 

Industry

1) What is Marcus Rashford's net worth and how does his online presence help him to make money? 

2) What charities and companies/brands is Marcus Rashford associated with? Why might they want to be linked to the Rashford brand?

3) Research Twitter and Instagram. Who owns the companies, how do they make money and how much profit did they make last year?

4) What are the worries about Instagram’s negative effects?

5) How do social media platforms manage online abuse on their platforms and why has Marcus Rashford drawn attention to this? How might this change in the future?

6) What happened by law in 2022 that changed the way the internet is regulated? Write three changes that this new law may bring in and explain why it is difficult to regulate the internet.

Due date: on Google Classroom

Grade 8/9 extension tasks

Look at this Marcus Rashford tweet. How does this help Rashford create a positive representation of himself and also control the media narrative?

Read this Guardian feature on Marcus Rashford being a Hero of 2020. What representation of Rashford does this offer?

Read this Guardian Books interview with Marcus Rashford. How does Rashford's work on reading and literacy help his reputation? Can you find any other interesting representations here?

Read this news story on Rashford being named one of the top ten most powerful black Britons. What does this suggest about race and ethnicity in Britain and the British media?

How does Marcus Rashford's online presence reflect modern society and culture?

Read this Sky Sports interview with Marcus Rashford saying online abuse should be easier to stop. What does he think the companies should be doing to regulate it?

If you want to test yourself at A Level or even degree level, try reading this chapter from A Level Media theorist Clay Shirky called Publish, Then Filter. How does Shirky suggest the internet has changed the way we engage with the media?

OSP: Introduction to influencers

Our new topic is Online, Social and Participatory Media - or OSP for short.

There's just one CSP to study here - Marcus Rashford and his online presence. This is an in-depth CSP and needs to be studied with reference to all four elements of the Theoretical Framework (Language, Representation, Industries, Audience) and all relevant contexts. 

But before we study Marcus Rashford in detail, we need to look at the rise of social media influencers and the impact this has had on media, society and culture.

The rise of influencers

The rise of influencers is a major change in media and culture due to technology, the internet and social media. Influencers give brands a new and powerful way to reach audiences but critics think that social media stars are taking advantage of their relationship with their followers.

User-generated content

Influencers exist because of changes in technology and the internet. This created social media sites like YouTube and Facebook and led to the rise in user-generated content.

User-generated content (UGC) is any content—text, videos, images, reviews, etc.—created by people, rather than brands.

UGC means audiences can be producers as well as consumers – we create and share media as well as viewing it.

How do influencers make money?

YouTuber Zoella (Zoe Sugg) started a blog at home and within a few years gained millions of followers and turned her online presence into a major financial opportunity.

It is estimated at one point Zoella made £15,000 a month from YouTube pre-roll advertising, up to £20,000 each for promotional videos or Instagram posts plus money from books and a beauty product range with Superdrug.

Influencers and their impact on media and culture

Are influencers having a positive or negative impact on society, media and culture? You need to be able to form your own opinion on this question. To help you, watch the following video from the BBC on how influencers make money and see if it changes your views:

Here's the extended 28-minute Panorama if you'd like to see more:

Extension - Bad Influencer: Belle Gibson & The Great Insta Con

The danger with user-generated content is whether we can trust what we see on social media. Belle Gibson was one of the first lifestyle influencers but ended up in a controversy over faking cancer diagnoses to promote her posts. This is a preview of a BBC3 documentary on Belle Gibson and the Great Insta Con:

Introduction to OSP: Influencers blog tasks

Read this article in The Week magazine on the rise of social media influencers and answer the following questions:  

1) What years did YouTube, Twitter and Instagram launch?

2) What is the definition of an influencer?

3) Give an example of an influencer and how many followers they have. Try and add some additional information, brand associations or other statistics if you can.

4) How big is the influencer industry according to the article?

5) What are the problems associated with being an influencer?

6) Why is it suggested that audiences actually like being sold products by influencers?

7) What representation of beauty is often found on Instagram or other influencer sites?

8) What is YOUR opinion on influencers? Are they a positive or negative influence on our society and culture? Why?

Grade 8/9 extension tasks

Read this Forbes article on how covid and TikTok have changed the influencer market in the last couple of years. What does this tell us about society and media culture - are we becoming more creative and independent or is this just another way to sell more products to more people?

Complete this for homework if you don't finish it in the lesson - due date on Google Classroom.