Promotional Screen Industries

Paul Grainge, Catherine Johnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317513728
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

From the trailers and promos that surround film and television to the ads and brand videos that are sought out and shared, promotional media have become a central part of contemporary screen life. Promotional Screen Industries is the first book to explore the sector responsible for this thriving area of media production.

In a wide-ranging analysis, Paul Grainge and Catherine Johnson explore the intermediaries – advertising agencies, television promotion specialists, movie trailer houses, digital design companies – that compete and collaborate in the fluid, fast-moving world of promotional screen work.

Through interview-based fieldwork with companies and practitioners based in the UK, US and China, Promotional Screen Industries encourages us to see promotion as a professional and creative discipline with its own opportunities and challenges. Outlining how shifts in the digital media environment have unsettled the boundaries of 'promotion' and 'content', the authors provide new insight into the sector, work, strategies and imaginaries of contemporary screen promotion.

With case studies on mobile communication, television, film and live events, this timely book offers a compelling examination of the industrial configurations and media forms, such as ads, apps, promos, trailers, digital shorts, branded entertainment and experiential media, that define promotional screen culture at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

I The Blurring Boundaries of Promotion and Content

1 On Promotional Screen Content

DOI: 10.4324/9781315718682-2

It's a problematic term really, I mean the term content … you know it's just such a horrible word. We use it because there is no better alternative and it's becoming the industry descriptor of choice.

(Andy Bryant, Director of Creative, Red Bee Media 2012)

Again and again in the interviews we conducted for this book with professionals from the promotional screen industries, the word ‘content’ recurred. From references to ‘branded content’, ‘liquid content’ and ‘catalytic content’ to ‘content platforms’, the term has become pervasive in discussions across the media industries. In November 2012 the UK branch of the media agency Mindshare held one of its annual ‘huddles’ focused specifically on ‘the future of content’. The day-long event addressed the changing face of content across film, music, television, news and technology, and included sessions called the ‘creative content lifecycle’, ‘the future of content is data’, and ‘is user-generated content the most engaging content?’ A year later, the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association held a sell-out event that examined ‘what content really means’ (MIMA 2013). If, as these examples suggest, the status of content is up for grabs, so too are questions about who gets to define the term in the world of digital media. As the former founding editor of Entertainment Weekly noted in a blog titled ‘What is content, then?’, ‘We in media … think we get to define what content is: It's what we make. But Google, for one, doesn't define content that way. It sees content everywhere’ (Jarvis 2010). These definitional issues are equally felt within academic debate. Paul McDonald, for instance, has argued that scholars in screen studies have ‘to face up to the unavoidable fact that film now exists as “content” in the convergent media environment, alongside – and integrated with – consumer video, games, music, and online video’ (2013: 148). Although sometimes used in begrudging ways by academics and industry executives alike – Mike Weise of the ad agency JWT calling it ‘the dreaded buzzword’ (2011) – ‘content’ has nevertheless become a ubiquitous designation that speaks to the unsettling of established discourses and practices within contemporary media production.

In considering this designation, Simone Murray writes of a ‘quintessentially 21st-century conceptualization of content as innately liquid and multipurposable’ (2005: 419). Like McDonald, she connects this with developments in entertainment media, and in particular, the ways in which ‘content packages’ are put together around anchor products such as movie blockbusters. Yet beyond Murray's discussions of cross-promotion, franchising and media branding are increasingly destabilized textual hierarchies between anchor products and promotional materials. As John Caldwell argues, promotional materials ‘persistently migrate or travel towards “primary” textual status’ within contemporary screen culture (2006: 103). Across our interviews, content was used not only to refer to films and television programmes, but also to a range of media paratexts and promotional forms that circulate between, beyond and below studio and network output. Indeed, the adoption of the term ‘content’ by the advertising industry in contemporary media discourse suggests that this blurring of promotion and content extends to more than the film and television industries and encompasses a broader cultural shift in screen media practice. On these terms, the liquidity of content not only describes the way that media brands transfer between platforms, it also suggests a loosening in the very parameters of what is defined as content and who produces that content.

In this chapter our intention is not to resolve these definitional difficulties, but rather to unpack the set of transitions within media culture that lie behind the reconceptualization of promotion as content. We address this in two ways. First, we examine the changes within media culture that have led to a blurring between ‘promotion’ and ‘content’ in a period when an increasing range of texts have come to circulate in more profuse ways across a greater range of screens and platforms. Second, we consider the specific case of branded entertainment. As Jennifer Gillan (2015) notes, branded entertainment is by no means new; ‘content promotion hybrids’ (sponsor entwinements, dramatized advertisements, product integrations) were utilized widely in mid-century American television programming. However, just as these strategies were a response to a period of media transition in the 1950s and 1960s – regarding the impact of new technologies on business models, fears about emergent viewing platforms, and anxieties about the behaviour of once dependence audiences – branded entertainment responded to an equivalent sense of transition in the first decades of the twenty-first century. As a site of discursive investment in the 2000s and 2010s, the term would come to denote the creation of promotion ‘of such merit or interest that the audience actively seeks it out’ (Lotz 2007: 172). In case terms, branded entertainment encapsulates the fluid boundaries of promotion and content within contemporary screen culture and reveals the shifting industrial configurations, and trade theorizations, that sit behind this change.

Blurred lines: the scope and status of promotional screen content

Promotional screen content can be broadly located within three areas that will be variously explored in this book: screen advertising, film and television marketing, and corporate and organizational promotion. These three areas have distinct histories, but each has undergone significant change as a consequence of broader shifts within the media landscape in the last two decades. While, as we shall go on to see, the precise nature of the change differs in relation to each area, they are similarly shaped by ‘the new strategic imperatives of ubiquity, mobility and interactivity’ (Boddy 2011: 76) that we outlined in the introduction to this book. These strategic imperatives offer a useful structuring device for mapping out the contexts within which the boundary lines between promotion and content have blurred in the contemporary media terrain.

The first decades of the twenty-first century have been characterized by a rapid increase in the number of sites where audiovisual forms can be viewed. These range from the development of new platforms for moving images, such as smartphones and tablets, to the growth of out-of-home media, such as digital billboards and interactive installations. In many senses, this increased ubiquity of audiovisual media can be traced back to developments in satellite, cable, fibre optics and broadband that have been expanding sites for accessing films, television programmes and advertising materials for decades. Yet the ubiquity of screen media has been accelerated by digitalization during the 2000s. This has facilitated the ease with which audiovisual texts can be reproduced and transferred across different platforms (Creeber and Martin 2009: 2). As such, the increased ubiquity of moving image media is intricately tied up with the increased mobility of such media. While, as Chuck Tryon (2013) argues, digital delivery has been technologically feasible since the late 1990s, it is only since the mid-2000s that it has begun to emerge as a dominant feature of the contemporary media landscape. This ranges from the expansion of digital cinema and television to the emergence of the internet as a platform for audiovisual material, notably in the burgeoning area of online video. More generally, the web has had a significant impact on the media terrain both in expanding the sites for moving image content and by facilitating the ways in which that content can be distributed and circulated (Tryon 2013). Beyond the emergence of digital cinema and television is what Tryon refers to as ‘platform mobility’ characterized by ‘the ongoing shift towards ubiquitous, mobile access to a wide range of entertainment choices’ (2013: 4).

The proliferation of sites for accessing audiovisual media and the ease with which that media can travel across platforms has led to increased audience fragmentation. Far from the mass audiences of the ‘era of scarcity’ (Ellis 2000), digital delivery addresses targeted or even individualized viewers through interfaces that purport to offer choice and control over media viewing (Tryon 2013). The increased ubiquity and mobility of media, therefore, is accompanied by a new dynamic of media consumption characterized by interactivity. Again, this can be understood as an extension of, rather than a radical break from, the past. With their roots in technologies such as the television remote control, new interfaces such as the personal video recorder or on-demand media services (such as Hulu and the BBC iPlayer) offer the contemporary viewer far greater choice and control over what, where and when to watch moving image content. This is what Philip Napoli refers to as ‘audience autonomy’, describing the extent to which audiences have control over their processes of media consumption (2011: 7). While alterations in the nature of viewer engagement are often discussed in relation to interactive forms of storytelling or participative forms of production (Jenkins 2006), Napoli argues that the key shift in audience autonomy lies not in the viewer's capacity to produce content, but to circulate it (2011: 81). Facilitated by video-sharing sites such as YouTube and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, this is what Jenkins, Ford and Green (2013) discuss as the new ‘spreadability’ of media. Epitomized in the concept of ‘Web 2.0’, the internet has become a participatory platform ‘predicated on sharing, collaboration and content creation’ (McStay 2010: 37). In this context, digital networks provide a space where content functions as part of the broader participatory culture of online social interaction. As such, ubiquity, mobility and interactivity should not be understood as distinct, but rather as interrelated phenomena tied to the expansion of networked digital sites that facilitate greater circulation of, and interaction with, audiovisual content.

These shifts in the media landscape are often positioned as a feature or consequence of convergence. Jonathan Hardy (2013) distinguishes between three areas of media convergence: technological, textual and industrial. Technological convergence is characterized by the emergence of networked systems that offer the potential for seamless digital interchangeability of media across platforms. This brings with it the potential for textual convergence where images and sounds can be experienced across a range of different media and can be recombined, unbundled and recomposed with ease. Meanwhile, industrial convergence describes the formation of giant media conglomerates that exploit this space by carrying, and controlling, the multiple media services that define contemporary communications systems. On these terms, media convergence describes a complex and uneven set of processes, practices, market conditions and power relations that centre on the ‘coming together of different technologies and industries to create new ways of producing, distributing and using cultural goods and services’ (Hardy 2013: 126, see also Meikle and Young 2012). In practice, convergence involves degrees of divergence in the way that different kinds of media are produced and consumed in relation to one another (Jenkins 2006). As Gerard Goggin argues, ‘the process of achieving digital technologies and their convergence is actually a messy, complicated, politically loaded and historically contingent affair’ (2012: 17). The rhetoric of convergence, therefore, can belie the continued institutional, technological and cultural barriers that constrain and shape the digital media landscape. Indeed Anja Bechmann Petersen (2006: 95) argues that the digital media environment is better understood as ‘cross-media’ rather than ‘convergent’, characterized by the coexistence of different media platforms and sites whereby the strategic imperatives of ubiquity, mobility and interactivity present possibilities and challenges to media organizations as something to be both exploited and controlled.

The shifts thus far outlined have fundamental ramifications for the traditional business models of the media industries, leading some to argue that the contemporary media scene is characterized by the development of a new ‘attention economy’ where the ubiquity and mobility of media has led to greater competition for audiences (Goldhaber 1997, Davenport and Beck 2001). While Max Dawson notes the pre-history of the attention economy thesis, dating back to the 1970s and theories of information overabundance, it was updated in the 1990s and 2000s to ‘describe the ways in which digital technologies were transforming not only the global economy but also people's everyday experience of labour and leisure’ (Dawson 2014: 231). One consequence for media producers of purported attention scarcity is that all forms of content have to work harder to stand out. This is not just because there is more audiovisual content. It also stems from the new possibilities of access and agency afforded to audiences in relation to content. While media and marketing companies still retain control over the ways in which films, television programmes and ad campaigns are released, they operate in a media environment where the ‘plasticity’ and ‘malleability’ of digital content more easily enables texts to be copied, edited, reshaped and recombined (Arvidsson 2006).

In the new economics of attention, it is not just the amount of time that people devote to media content that is at stake, but also the quality of that attention (Dovey 2011). Content is not simply about ratings and viewing hits, in this sense, but also the depth of involvement, interest and feeling (or affect) that audiovisual forms can inspire. This is not to argue that there has never been an attention economy around media. After all, the economics of the thirty-second advertising spot is predicated on the sale of viewer attention. As Ben Roberts argues, modern consumer capitalist economies have a history of attempting ‘to organize attention through the agency of advertising and public relations’ (2012: 4). Neither is it to argue that audience engagement with screen media has never been two-way before, as anyone who has ever written to a television programme or magazine would attest. However, digitalization ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I The Blurring Boundaries of Promotion and Content
• Part II Media Promotion
• Conclusion: Only Promotion
• Index