Conference Agenda

Video advertisements for ultra-processed foods (UPF) rely heavily on sound and music in crafting a compelling multisensory environment that sells a “happy eating” impression, and normalizes the habitual intake of unhealthy foods, even as they continue to draw criticism for their negative health and environmental impacts. In recent years, driven by the unparalleled mass appeal that platforms such as TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts command, vertically oriented video content has exploded. These “verticals” are produced at high frequency and scale, often with shorter durations and much greater volume than traditional horizontal formats. In the context of UPF brands, the considerations including taboos involved in producing traditional horizontal ads and vertical ads differ significantly, which in turn directly influences the role of music and sound in these commercials. This paper focuses on recent video advertisements that promote UPF products targeting the U.S. market, particularly those in vertical formats. Building on prior scholarship on music, advertising, and consumer culture, particularly Timothy Taylor’s analyses of how music operates as a tool of branding, as well as audiovisual theories developed by Michel Chion, I will first present the market context of UPF advertising and the advancement of “happy eating” often associated with UPF brands. Thereafter, I propose an analytical framework centered on temporal compression, hyper-association, and sonic consistency to examine the use of sound and music in vertical ads. Finally, through two case studies of products by the prominent UPF brands Nongshim and Lay’s, I argue that the emerging sonic conventions of vertically oriented UPF commercials signal the formation of a new audiovisual logic where sound and music act as powerful accomplices in the ideological labor of constructing the “happy eating” illusion, even more direct and potent than in traditional horizontal ads. As the volume of vertical UPF ads continues to grow, so too will the development of systematic strategies reflecting “industry standards” in content production be optimized for the vertical screen, designed to sell, normalize, and aestheticize products linked to unsustainable food systems.

Gabriela Montero is a world-renowned pianist and political activist who has revisited and revitalized Western art music improvisation. While the Internet contains videos of Montero improvising for audiences all over the world, depicting a variety of musical styles or themes, such as the “Harry Potter Theme,” or “Amazing Grace,” there is a completely different selection of improvisations focusing on the political situation in Venezuela. Montero, who belongs to a group of musicians engaged in human rights activism, displayed an active persona as a political activist during the dictatorship initiated by Hugo Chávez (1951-2013) and maintained by Nicolás Maduro (1962). As such, Montero has actively utilized social media platforms including YouTube, Facebook, and X (former Twitter) to record and distribute her improvisations concerning the Venezuelan humanitarian crisis. Montero’s improvisations represent a discourse about ethics, human rights, democracy, and freedom. Throughout this presentation, I aim to demonstrate Montero’s use of cultural activism, glossing, intertextuality and dialogism in her improvisations to articulate a political discourse in cyberspace. As a result, I will focus primarily on Monteros’ improvisations of the Venezuelan National Anthem (VNA) “Gloria al bravo pueblo” (“Glory to the Brave People”), which demonstrate her ability to create generic mutations of musical works that can be performed utilizing different genre musical characteristics. Namely, Montero’s mediation and intervention as an improviser manifests the concept of generic mutation in the VNA—a process by which artists can alter a particular genre of music into a different one through their agency. Ergo, Montero’s digital activism represents part of her attempt to maintain a sense of belonging and memory to Venezuela while, at the same time, improvisations allow her to challenge the destructive regime’s zero-sum and Manichaeism discourse. In the same manner, this presentation explores how Montero’s improvisations on Venezuela function as a healing ritual for her and her followers in cyberspace. In sum, this presentation examines Gabriela Montero’s musical construction of symbolic meaning as a discourse that reimagines the art of improvisation and transforms it into a political discourse for human rights and democracy in Venezuela.

Scrolling through a tracklist reveal, the same dog reappears—new fan, same puppy, same soft lighting. Each post promises access: not just to an album, but to proximity, warmth, and recognition. What looks like cuteness is, on closer listening, a carefully staged encounter between star, fan, animal, and algorithm. This presentation examines the intersections of pets, fandom, album promotion, and star personal branding through a case study of Sabrina Carpenter’s Man’s Best Friend (2025), focusing on the fan-integrated tracklist reveal series that featured hand-selected fans posing with a golden retriever puppy. Situating the campaign within frameworks from fan studies, celebrity studies, animal studies, and cultural branding, I argue that Carpenter’s strategy exemplifies a broader shift in contemporary pop marketing toward staged intimacy, affective participation, and symbolic interactivity, in which pets function as affective mediators between star, fan, and platform (Love 2019; Palmer 2020).

Across this album era, canine imagery circulates through music videos, social media posts, interviews, and fan practices, producing “promotional domesticity”: a branding mode that situates the pop star within scenes of care, loyalty, and emotional availability. Drawing on scholarship on fandom’s affective labor and participatory economies (DiPiero 2025; Vesey 2024), I examine how pets help reframe promotional activity as everyday intimacy rather than overt marketing. The dog becomes a semiotic anchor for cuteness, trust, and moral legibility, aligning Carpenter with culturally feminized expectations of nurture and relational authenticity (Hansen 2019; Ngai 2012).

Through analysis of visual composition, captioning strategies, paratextual media coverage, and fan responses—including meme-making, fan art, and algorithmic amplification—the article demonstrates how the tracklist reveal functioned as a performative act of co-authorship rather than a unidirectional publicity event. At the same time, the campaign foregrounds tensions central to contemporary fan–celebrity relations: the commodification of care, the anthropomorphization of animals, and the strategic ambivalence of participatory culture under platform capitalism (Abidin 2018). Ultimately, this study argues that Man’s Best Friend reveals how pets operate as crucial symbolic infrastructures in twenty-first-century pop stardom, mediating intimacy, gendered affect, and fan visibility while complicating prevailing narratives of empowerment and authenticity in digital celebrity culture.