Celia Lury's contribution to the sociology of culture has developed through a series of inter-linked empirical research projects. She is currently writing up one of these studies as The Global Culture Industry: The Mediation of Things (jointly with Professor Scott Lash, Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths). This research was initially developed by a small team based at Lancaster University, but its membership has since evolved so as to include colleagues from Goldsmiths and elsewhere. Its continuing success is shown by the award of the third in a series of major grants, the first two being the two ESRC-funded team projects, 'The global biography of cultural products' and 'Silicon alleys and virtual objects' (each of which was part of an ESRC Programme). The third and latest is part of the PACCIT Programme and is co-funded by the ESRC, the ESPRC and the DTI. The research looks at the use of interactive media in a cross-platform environment. The project brings together the research team with a TV production house, an internet company, and broadcasting end-users for in-depth research and development in broadband media.

Three other projects are relevant here in relation to Celia's interests in the sociology of culture. The first is her most recent book Brands: the logos of the global cultural economy (Routledge, 2004), which analyses the brand as a new media object. The second project is her involvement in a newly established centre in the Department, the Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process. She was one of the co-organisers of the conference Virtuality: Information-Matter-Property (with Dr. Mariam Fraser and Dr. Sarah Kember), the proceedings of which are being published as a Special Issue of Theory, Culture and Society (2005). She is currently involved in organising two further conferences, one on branding, and one on the problem of colour as part of her participation in the Centre. The third project is an ongoing involvement in the development of a visual sociology, and a concern with innovation in methods.

In this essay we address one of the major developments associated with the rise of branding: its role in generating new techniques for making and measuring value. Although mechanisms exist through which brands may be valued (e.g. Interbrand 1997), the status and credibility of such systems has been questioned (Barwise et al., 1989; Power 1997). Indeed, the question of whether and how brands create value for themselves or for consumers remains contested, with critics such as Arvidsson (2006) suggesting that brand value increasingly depends upon the freely-generated productive activities of consumers. Building on this insight, our essay explores in more detail how brands make use of specific technical devices and forms of social action in order to create and measure value, and the implications of this for understanding the relationships between promotional culture, consumers and new media.

Our paper begins with an account of what we see as the key functions of branding in its contemporary incarnation. While early definitions of branding saw its role primarily in terms of differentiating similar products and reassuring consumers as to the origins, status and qualities of goods, recent accounts suggest that it has taken on a series of more expansive and dynamic properties. Brands are seen as having the capacity to embody relationships between companies and consumers, to function as wealth-generating financial assets, to provide a framework for new product and service development, to generate 'knowledge capital' by attracting particular types of employees, and to intervene in the structure of markets. At the same time we recognise that branding proceeds in different ways in a wide range of different institutional contexts. Branding is assembled or put together differently in these different contexts, where it involves different forms of representation, different techniques and technologies, and different kinds of relationships for different kinds of strategic purposes (Moor, 2007). In this first section of the essay, therefore, we provide an overview of these functions, and use them to develop a theory of brands that emphasizes their status as complex 'new media objects' (Lury 2004) with relational and generative capacities.

We go on to examine in more depth the social and technical means through which brands may generate value. We focus on three areas: Firstly, we examine the dimensions of value encoded in various formal systems for valuing brands, including those used by Interbrand and other large branding consultancies. Secondly, we suggest that a constellation of discourses about what brands are or should be (including the demand that they exhibit greater 'transparency') has itself been productive of new systems, metrics and forms of knowledge designed to capture brand value and render it explicit. These, we suggest, add up to a proliferation of partial, overlapping, semi-private Ð sometimes proprietary - systems for measuring value, which sit in an uneasy relationship with more established forms of promotion. Third and finally, we turn to the use of user-generated feedback, socio-demographic data and user testing, both as sources of value in their own right, and as a means by which new types of value can be created. In this context, we suggest, one of the newly important roles of consumers is as agents of promotion who, through their engagement with particular technologies, systems and environments, produce information that can be valued, sold, and looped back into the value chain. We conclude with a series of observations on these more complex regimes of promotion and value, and on the possibilities for academic intervention in value systems that are themselves increasingly characterised by reflexive knowledge-generating processes.