Promotional Convergence and Political Economic Critique: Assessing Integrations Across Media and Advertising Industries

This chapter addresses how media, promotion and advertising are interconnected across contemporary communications industries and practices. It outlines key features of media-marketing political economy and presents a framework to examine and evaluate interconnections across different domains of promotional convergence: corporate ownership/relationships; institutional arrangements; markets; operations and practices; values/norms/identities; communication forms and formats; relations with users; governance. The chapter discusses and illustrates media companies’ promotion and cross-promotion, brands’ owned media, branded content and influencer marketing to show how the core triad of marketers, marketing agencies and media remains discernible but has continued to converge, extend and hybridise. Yet, while it is necessary to grasp the dynamics of this wider space of converged promotional practices, the chapter argues it is also vital to recognise the cultural significance of historical and contemporary efforts to separate and demarcate media and advertising, and set limits on marketers’ power and reach. The chapter advances a critical analysis of promotional media that resists merging key differences concerning communications purposes and agency, the place and provenance of communications, governance, expectations and user relations, payment and control, to offer a critical account of power asymmetries in promotional communications.