Governance-in-Practice. A report by the Branded Content Governance Project

This report by the Branded Content Governance Project presents interview, roundtable and desk research on branded content practitioners in the UK and Spain. Governance-in-practice refers to the processes by which individuals, teams and networked practitioners reflect and act in accordance with rulemaking/rule-shaping and internalised norms. This major report forms part of the Branded Content Governance Project (BCGP) and our analysis of governance across 32 countries (Hardy et al. 2025) as well as more detailed comparative analysis of the UK and Spain focused on policy analysis (Hardy et al. 2025), media reporting (Hardy 2025) and this report on practitioners' governance-in-practice (MacRury et al. 2025). For more details on BCGP publications, see 10.25441/arts.30998353.

The Branded Content Governance (BCG) project is led by academics at three Universities. Prof. Jonathan Hardy, University of the Arts London is Principal Investigator, working with two Co- Investigators, Prof. Iain MacRury, University of Stirling, and Prof. Patricia Núñez Gómez, Complutense University of Madrid. This report has been written by Iain MacRury with co-authors Patricia Núñez Gómez, Jonathan Hardy and Maciej Wysokinski. The BCGP is jointly funded by two research councils within UK Research and Innovation, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), (ES/W007991/1).