Crims and crooks: automatization, communicative capitalism, fandom, and promotion for Wentworth

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay examines domestic and international marketing campaigns for the Australian prison drama, Wentworth (Foxtel, 2013–Present), as an intervention into the relationship between (digital) marketing strategies and fan engagement with televisual ideologies. We comment on how three manifestations of marketing (via two campaigns) connect back to automatization, capitalism, incarceration, and media using both technological automation and fan labor—and argue that the campaigns’ use of automation and participatory culture exploited fan communication and fetishized incarceration for capitalistic gain. Extending previous scholarship around participatory culture’s reliance on audience labor and applying a critical cultural studies lens, we elucidate how the show utilized cross-cultural marketing approaches that stood at ideological odds with the show’s content. The first campaign, Australia’s Foxtel promotion of Season Five, employed full automatization to alter the fan viewing experience and maximize profits. The second campaign by Spain’s Calle 13 promoted the series’ Spanish debut. The backdrop for Calle 13’s campaign was drastically different, including only partial automation. It reduced fan interaction and used participatory culture to collect audience information. Both campaigns commercialized fan culture and utilized varying levels of automation to more firmly position prison as an entertainment landscape, simultaneously de-humanizing the experiences of women inmates offscreen.