Branded Content

"Advertising has gone native. From sponsorship and product placement to advergames and YouTube influencers brand promotion is now stitched seamlessly into media flows of news, fiction, entertainment, conversation and interaction. Jonathan Hardys carefully researched forays have produced the best map so far of this expanding territory and prompted thoughtful reflections on how we should respond. Filled with informative examples and provocative insights it is indispensable reading for anyone concerned with the accelerating corporate enclosure of public expression" - Graham Murdock, Professor of Media and Communication at Loughborough University London "Branded Content zeros in on the signal social challenge of financing the media in the 21st century. With this book, Jonathan Hardy provides an expert, accessible guide to major developments coursing through the advertising-and-media system. Adamant about the importance of historical understanding, he links the past to the present and possible future. He carefully lays out the political economic and social factors guiding and resisting branded content developments. While his focus is branded content, Hardy ranges across several forms of advertising-media relationships, interrogating their often-problematic implications for audiences and suggesting possible policy responses." - Joseph Turow, Professor of Media Systems & Industries, The Annenberg School for Communication. "Branded Content is a timely intervention into conversations about the fate of media in the twenty-first century, arguing that the convergence of media and marketing organizations is both inevitable and fraught with consequence. With a measured, taxonomic approach to the messy world of branded content, native advertising, and content marketing, Hardy details the gradual encroachment of advertising into other kinds of communicative spaces, as well as efforts to regulate such encroachments. Drawing on and updating critical political economy, Hardy convincingly demonstrates that research approaches to the converged world of branded content require a rethinking not only of theories of media and capital, but of the disciplinary structures of communications research itself." - Lisa Lynch, Associate Professor and Program Director of Media and Communications, Drew University

Jonathan Hardy is Professor of Communications and Media at the University of the Arts London. He writes and comments on media industries, media and advertising, communications regulation, and international media systems. His books include Critical Political Economy of the Media (2014), Cross-Media Promotion (2010), and Western Media Systems (2008). He is co-editor of The Advertising Handbook (2018) and is series editor of Routledge Critical Advertising Studies. He is a member of the editorial boards of Digital Journalism, Political Economy of Communication, Mediterranean Journal of Communication, and TripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique.

Part One: Practices 1 Advertising and media: separation and integration 2. News Media and Marketing 3. Branded entertainment and product integration 4. Brand content direct to you: marketers owned media 5. Going native in digital media 6. Media as Marketers Part Two: Policies and Problems 7. Regulating convergent media and marketing communications 8. Lobbying, liberalisation, normalisation, and contestation 9. Communication gains and losses: economic, cultural, and societal 10. Media and marketing critiques: renewing the radical tradition 11. Advertising and Media (reprise): contesting normalisation