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Understanding Hypercommercialized Media Texts

Matthew P. McAllister and Alexandra Nutter Smith

Filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, in his satirical 2011 documentary Pom Wonderful Presents The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, asks Ralph Nader, “Where should I be able to go where I don't see one bit of advertising?” Nader's response is, “To sleep.” As this exchange signals, the “millennial era” may be someday known as the “hypercommercialized era.” Commercial and promotional intrusion is found in several venues, including politics, education, and medicine (Aronczyk & Powers, 2010). As Spurlock self-reflexively explores, one especially key location is in media content. Media texts not designated as “advertising” have become increasingly invaded by advertising messages and branded icons. Since 2000, in the United States we have seen such commercially and promotionally oriented phenomena as:

• Madden Nation, a television program on the cable television network ESPN that debuted in 2005. Jointly created by ESPN and the videogame company EA Sports, the program featured expert players of the Madden NFL videogame squaring off against each other for the right to be crowned champion of that particular game each season. When aired on ESPN, Madden Nation – a giant commercial for the videogame – also featured ads for other products and promotions for other shows, most demographically targeted for the young, sports-oriented male.
• Lucky magazine, a hybrid of a magazine and shopping catalog with different textual features that blur the commercial, the editorial, and the promotional. Debuting in 2000, Lucky is seen as a significant brand-friendly success for the embattled magazine industry. As the editor of Lucky beamed, “everything in Lucky has got to be worth explaining to your friend why she should buy it” (quoted in McNamara, 2011, n.p.).
• The use of “long-form” ads like BMW's The Hire. A 2001 series of five-minute-long “webisodes,” The Hire used the talents of such directors as Guy Richie and Ang Lee to tout BMW's maneuverability in these half films/half ads. Available for a time on BMW's website, teaser television commercials for the webisodes – ads for ads – aired on television in early 2001 (Owczarski, 2007). DVDs of the ad-based webisodes may be purchased on Amazon, which also includes DVD extras like two “making of” features about the campaign.

Although these examples are all from post-2000, they illustrate trends that began at least in the mid-1980s toward a “hypercommercialization” of culture (McChesney, 1999). Certainly the presence of intrusive advertising is nothing new, but the particular modern versions, the reasons for them, and their implications in our current cultural context have attracted a large amount of scholarship and triggered some rethinking of assumptions about the relationship of advertising to media content. Much of the scholarship examining hypercommercialism focuses on the United States, which is also largely the focus of this chapter, but this is a global phenomenon that likewise has its roots in the 1980s (Frith & Mueller, 2010; Mattelart, 1991).

Hypercommercialism often involves the blurring of commercial assumptions and messages into different cultural forms. It can involve the relatively superficial, such as product placement: inserting brands into the background of a scene or the casual use of a brand by a character in a movie or television program (Galician, 2004). More intense versions include product integration, where a brand becomes part of a plot for a movie or a TV episode, and branded entertainment, where a brand becomes the premise for some sort of entertainment (Lehu, 2007), such as Madden Nation. Hypercommercialism has invented new hybrid forms, often signaled by mutated words like infomercial, advertorial, advertainment, and advergaming. As Mattelart observed early in this cultural trend, such hybridity removes distinctions “between news and commercials, advertising and editorial, publicity and journalism, publicity and reportage, between promotional surface and editorial content, advertising and the programme” (1991, p. 130). It also involves the mixing of different textual types together in a way that may integrate a larger flow of commercial and promotional messages. As will be reviewed, the nature of hypercommercial texts has implications for culture and democracy.

The majority of research on hypercommercial techniques such as product placement and sponsorship is conducted from a business-oriented point of view: do these techniques sell, and how can we make them more effective? But a significant amount of scholarship from a critical and cultural perspective focuses on the ideological and cultural dynamics of these texts, including the effect of hypercommercialism on artistic autonomy, cultural space, democracy, diversity, and critical thinking. Given their hybrid nature and the different contexts in which they may appear, studying modern hypercommercial texts is especially challenging.

This chapter will explore some of these trends, the reasons why we see them now, the research that has attempted to understand these developments, and contextual complications that can arise in critiquing hypercommercialism. The chapter will end with a discussion of the future of hypercommercial trends, including likely forthcoming variants and points of resistance.

Precedents and Context

McChesney specifically labeled our modern times as the “age of hypercommercialism” (1999, 2004) and a “commercial tidal wave” (McChesney & Foster, 2003). Others have talked about “the commercialization of culture” (McAllister, 1996), the “web of brands” (Klein, 1999), advertising “clutter” (Goldman & Papson, 1996), “the dangerous spread of commercialized culture” and “ad creep” (Ruskin & Schor, 2005; Bettig & Hall, 2012). Such work focuses on both the wide breadth of advertising and corporate promotional visibility throughout different sectors of society and culture, and the imposing depth of control over media content and culture by advertising forces.

Earlier eras have also seen very visible and pervasive forms of advertising, shaped by particular economic and technological dynamics. Raymond Williams (1980) argued that observers of many different eras have been so distraught with the presence of commercial messages that they often declared that it could not possibly get any worse. (The authors of this chapter, on the other hand, will argue at the end that it absolutely can get worse.) The streets of mid- and late nineteenth-century London were filled with flyers, posters, placards, and walking sandwich boards, while newspapers became more receptive to advertising placement. At about the same time in the United States, national magazines and newspapers began to generate the majority of their revenue from advertisers, thereby shaping content to be complementary to the advertising messages (Andersen, 1995; Baker, 1994; Ohmann, 1996).

A commercial surge in the United States also occurred between the 1930s and the 1950s, as a sponsorship model of funding was applied to radio and television. In such cases, one broadcast program would be funded by, and exclusively promote, one brand. Advertising agencies representing these brands produced programs for the broadcasting networks, facilitating the infiltration of programs with the sponsoring brands and using program hosts and actors to pitch brands during the commercial breaks (Cross, 2000; Samuel, 2001).

A case can be made that we have entered a new era of hypercommercialism with its own unique contextual forces and characteristics. Digital technologies since the 1990s have had complex effects upon the nature and degree of commercialism in society. Certainly, older technologies such as the remote controls and VCRs in the 1980s introduced the idea of “viewer control” over when or even if viewers had to watch the commercials. However, digital viewing technologies like the DVR accelerated this anxiety for many advertisers (Carlson, 2006). These technologies combined with theoretical “ad-free” televisual spaces such as premium cable networks, on-demand movie services, and videogame consoles that frustrated advertisers from reaching prime demographics. As a result, advertisers became more aggressive in blurring the line between advertising and programming (i.e., product placement), making it more difficult to avoid ads and demanding that media creators cede control to commercial interests.

The effect of the Internet upon advertising and promotional practices has been and will continue to be enormous (Spurgeon, 2008). Its layout protocols and multimedia modalities encourage the blending of different content categories, including commercial forms with noncommercial forms. It creates additional and enduring commercial spaces, such as websites devoted to promotion and branding and the archiving of television and print commercials that previously had a limited shelf life. Given that it costs no more to link a 10-minute-long video than a 5-second-long video to a site, longer promotional forms are viable on the web, including hybrid promotional forms such as “advergaming” and “webisodes.”

The Internet also pressures traditional media to be more advertising receptive. The redirection of advertising dollars to the Internet means that newspapers and television are increasingly desperate to retain advertisers – and therefore more likely to give advertisers increased influence over content decisions. The Internet easily matches specific ads with specific content or user behavior such as search terms and previous web uses: banner ads for travel services next to web stories, search results about travel, or suggestions about future purchasing based upon purchase history. A similar commercial innovation is the development of behavioral measurements of advertising effectiveness for the Internet – such as “click-through” aggregates that indicate how many web users have not only seen a banner ad on a website, but actually acted upon it.

Other media developments encourage the hypercommercialization of culture. Modern media corporations both distribute advertising for other companies and have their own brands to sell. Scholars analyzed the media's own “promotional culture” (Wernick, 1991) and cross-media synergy (Meehan, 1991) well before digital forms were introduced. But the monetization of media products facilitated by digital media – selling film and TV programs as DVDs and through e-commerce sites such as iTunes – further emphasizes media promotion. Corporations leverage their licensed brands in various revenue-generating forms and in publicity-generating forms such as magazine covers, behind-the-scenes features, and cross-promotions with fast-food companies and other marketing partners (Gray, 2010; McAllister, 2000). Because a corporation like Disney depends on both advertising revenue through its subsidiaries like ESPN and ABC and direct-sales revenue, such corporations are constantly searching for corporate partners who aggressively mix advertising buying with cross-promotion for media licensing. Such deals often include inserting promotional messages in movies and television programs.

Changes in the advertising industry also facilitate hypercommercialization. The growth and influence of global holding organizations such as the WPP Group and Omnicom, who in turn own several large agencies each, began in earnest in the 1980s and 1990s (Leiss, Kline, Jhally, & Botterill, 2005). Not only can such holding companies create and place global advertising campaigns, but they also encourage the practice of large-scale integrated marketing campaigns (IMC), where the traditional marketing functions of advertising, promotion, and public relations coordinate the placement of “on-topic” branded messages in many different locations. The Internet similarly encourages IMC, given its abilities to easily fold in traditional advertising forms with press releases, e-commerce, sales promotions, and publicity for sponsored and cross-promotional events. Social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter have become valuable IMC tools that can complement and extend print and television advertising campaigns cheaply.

Hypercommercialism has several implications for our culture and society (see, for example, Budd, Craig, & Steinman, 1999; Bullen, 2009). It infuses our culture with amplified consumerist perspectives that further the social practice of brands and shopping as symbols for status and identity. Hypercommercialism shrinks the amount of ad-free cultural space (as Ralph Nader wryly notes at the beginning of this chapter), making commercial influences a powerful force in the public sphere. It undermines media literacy as commercial and noncommercial forms become difficult to distinguish, a primary criterion for evaluating when a message is designed to persuade and when it is designed to entertain or inform. Artistic and democratic autonomy in media is eroded, and critical examinations of consumer and commercial culture within media texts are muted. In its modern manifestations, hypercommercialism combines media messages with capabilities of digital technology, including e-commerce, data mining, target marketing, and niche market discrimination (for the latter, see Turow, 2006).

Hypercommercialism is a trans-media phenomenon. Using previous scholarship, the following sections review just a few – but by no means all – of the most striking cultural and mediated domains where such trends occur.

Film and Television Entertainment

The insertion of brands in films and TV has a long history (Newell, Salmon, & Chang, 2006; Turner, 2004). However, during the 1980s and 1990s product placement in film was further institutionalized and became an assumed industrial practice (Miller, 1990; Wasko, Phillips, & Purdie, 1993). Product placement encourages particular types of films: action-adventure and comedies (since these are conducive to commercial messages), movies with happy endings, and scripts with product placement-friendly scenes. Licensed-based films like The Mighty Ducks franchise (or comic-book-based films) not only plug the license but also create an environment for other product insertions (Fuller, 1997). Miller notes that the exchange of directing talent between movies and commercials influenced the style of films to make them more commercial-like. Rising costs encourage product placement opportunities be targeted early in the filmmaking process, even while the script is still being formed, and with assurances of positive framing for the brands (Clifford, 2010).

With its diversity of advertisers, television has a different history with product placement than film. Although the sponsorship era in the 1950s saw many product inserts, the routine placement of products in prime-time scripted shows was arguably downplayed from the mid-1960s until the 1990s. The 1990s featured a significant increase (Andersen, 1995; Budd et al., 1999). Reality television's “spontaneous,” non-scripted image and commercialized financing of production helped legitimize the practice (Deery, 2004; Magder, 2009). Deery, for instance, argues that two subcategories of reality shows – the hedonistic and the Spartan – both ease the integration of brands. Hedonistic programs, like The Apprentice, wallow in the exhibition of high-end brands that are associated with The Good Life (see also Jenkins, 2006). Spartan programs such as Survivor, on the other hand, deprive contestants of brands and they are sometimes literally in tears when hosts offer up branded snacks as rewards. In such cases, brands become hailed as heroes to the contestants. However, as will be detailed later, product placement and product integration are now common in scripted television programs.

Other incentives encourage hypercommercial television content. Television programs and networks are designed to create friendly environments for advertising messages. Specific genres and channels oriented around makeovers (Sender, 2006), wedding and romance programs (Engstrom, 2008), and programs on The Food Network (Ketchum, 2007) celebrate the creation of identity and empowerment through consumption and heavily promote and merchandise branded goods, including cross-promoted or synergistic partners. Wenner (2004) notes that with the increased sophistication of digital production techniques, retroactive digital inserts of products into older films and television shows may become more likely and introduce particularly dicey ethical concerns. Of course, home shopping channels integrate direct commerce with around-the-clock promises of not just bargains, but also class mobility through brand acquisition (Cook, 2000). Home shopping's ultimate legacy may be as an early model for the blending of television and e-commerce, as will be discussed in the chapter's conclusion.

Sports

Andersen (1995) labeled the marriage of brand marketing and large-scale mediated sports as “probably the most commercialized sector of popular entertainment.” Mediated sports, given their entertainment orientation, appeal to consumption-oriented males (Vavrus, 2007), cultivation of passionate fandom, and image of being apolitical entertainment, make them a cultural form of great appeal to marketers and advertisers. The Superbowl, for example, is one of the biggest venues for high-profile advertising. The 1984 airing of the “Big Brother”-themed commercial that debuted the Macintosh computer was a watershed for large-scale “event” advertising (Stein, 2002). Since then, the Superbowl has become a large-scale celebration of advertising, with news coverage, advanced marketing hype, and reviews of the commercials afterwards (McAllister, 1999).

Sports are also visible cultural venues for corporate sponsorship, where brands are woven throughout team and event symbolism. Globally, sports such as soccer and rugby create long-term sponsorship deals with particular brands like Adidas. Such arrangements trigger struggles over the cultural meanings of teams as their status as both local or national public goods and their commercialized meaning as globalized commodity and sponsorship partners collide (Scherer, Falcous, & Jackson, 2008). In the United States, some of the most commercialized forms of sports are in the so-called amateur realm. The Olympics offers a long history of sponsorship association, including the 1992 Olympics and the heavy promotion of the US basketball “Dream Team” spreading messages of nationalism and individual heroism in different promotional forms (Wenner, 1994). US broadcasts of end-of-season college football bowl games fill the screen with both the title sponsor (such as the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl) and subsidiary advertisers throughout the broadcast of those games. The sponsor's name appears on field and stadium signage as well as on player uniforms, but also increasingly throughout the broadcast as digitally inserted graphics. In such cases, college sports arguably are among the most commercialized forms on US television; for example, less than 20% of the broadcast of the 2007 US national championship football game airing on the Fox network was without a corporate logo or brand name on the TV screen (McAllister, 2010).

As a highly commercialized form of entertainment, sports may serve as a “ground-breaker” for invasive marketing and therefore a source of legitimation for increased visibility of corporate brands in other venues and forms of culture.

Children's Culture

Schor (2005) argues that the biggest growth market in the late 1990s was children, with US teen and “tweens” becoming “the most brand-oriented, consumer-involved, and materialistic generations in history” (p. 13). Kids' media are especially characterized by a triple-whammy of marketing incentives: (1) media corporations such as Disney and Time-Warner promoting their own licensed merchandise (like iCarly and Superman, respectively); (2) kids-oriented brands for fast food, cereal, and toys/games heavily advertising and cross-promoting on children's media; and (3) adult-oriented brands – vehicles and vacation spots – targeting kids because of their role as an important “influence market” over family purchasing decisions.

The commercialization of children's media is therefore highly integrated, where it is difficult to discriminate media content from commercial and promotional messages. Books based on branded goods such as M&M Counting books mimic the packaging of those goods (Linn, 2004). Teen girl magazine articles about the prom focus on empowering the self through prom-oriented commodities also advertised throughout the magazines (Mazzarella, 1999). Branded programs on the Disney Channel and even state-funded channels serve as “program-length commercials” for licenses and brands (Mjøs, 2010). Children's television flow between product commercials, branded programming, and branded “program separators” – the latter purportedly designed to create spaces between ads and non-ads but frequently using corporate logos – blend elements even further (McAllister & Giglio, 2005). Websites designed for children routinely contain unlabeled and integrated forms of advertising (Nairn, 2008). One such integrated form is the advergame, blurring distinctions between marketing communication and mediated content. Games found on branded websites like Nickelodeon.com are more likely to restrict children's play to a “branded universe” than foster more creative approaches. In some cases, the chat rooms in such branded sites limit responses to certain options via pull-down menus, with many of these options being brand licensing oriented (Grimes, 2008). Food companies that target children heavily use advergames on their websites to promote their products; unhealthy foods high in sugar and/or fat are especially likely to use this promotional strategy, with candy and gum brands being the most frequently found advergamed food product (Lee, Choi, Quilliam, & Cole, 2009).

A children's brand such as Bratz is not just available as dolls and toys but is also a post hoc media entity, featuring an animated television show, a live-action Hollywood film, DVDs, CDs, books, and magazines. Not only is the overall Bratz brand promoted in these media, but so are specific Bratz products as well as the perpetuating of shopping and consumption as a form of girl empowerment (McAllister, 2007). Even without specific financial relationships between a media creator and marketer, children's media, including fictional books, may be filled with references to consumer brands as ways to distinguish character preferences, but still nevertheless encourage a consumption orientation (Bullen, 2009).

Journalism

A common assumption about the ideal structure of modern news is that a wall separates the business functions of a news organization from its news gathering functions. With this wall, reporters have autonomy from advertising and ownership influence and can maximize the contribution of journalism as a public good. However, many critics argue that this wall – if it ever really existed as a perfect barrier – has eroded against surging promotional tides (Bagdikian, 2004; Baker, 1994; McChesney, 1999). Advertising's effect on news is wide, including shifts toward more business-oriented stories and away from labor reporting, appeals to more upscale readers and the ignoring of more underprivileged areas of communities, hesitancy to criticize advertisers, acceptance of press release-oriented stories, and emphases on ad-friendly news topics such as celebrity, fashion, and lifestyle news. Ironically, shifts in advertising revenues may lead to the eventual demise of journalism's flagship medium, the newspaper, but this demise could also be attributed to newspapers' moving away from what they do best historically (watchdog and public advocacy journalism), a movement encouraged by their advertising-revenue orientation (McChesney & Nichols, 2010).

As examples like Starbucks' sponsorship of cable network MSNBC's Morning Joe program make clear (Stelter, 2009), television news may be especially susceptible to specific forms of hypercommercial content, including the insertion of advertising and promotional messages in the news. Wood, Nelson, Cho, and Yaros (2004) found significant brand mentions in late afternoon and evening television news, especially local news. They also found instances of what they called “cross-promotion” and what other scholars have labeled “synergy bias” (Williams, 2002) and “plugola” (Higgins & Sussman, 2007; McAllister, 2002). Morning news programs may be especially accepting of promotional and synergistic content (Cleary & Adams-Bloom, 2009), with stories about films, programs, or other brands owned by the parent corporation. In such cases, news becomes a promotional arm of its corporate parent, and it is a characteristic of news divisions owned by entertainment conglomerates oriented toward brand licensing.

Music

Modern music has long embraced aggressive forms of promotion, as payola scandals since at least the 1950s indicate. Integrated promotion is a staple of the modern music industry. MTV, for example, was built on the idea of short promotional forms (music videos) as its early content premise. Music videos served as marketing vehicles for music sales and had a style that both influenced and was influenced by television advertising (Aufderheide, 1986).

As with many media facing the digital age, the music industry faces significant challenges to its traditional business model, and these challenges have encouraged an embrace of advertising partnerships. Klein (2009) explores the integration of music into advertising, arguing that increasingly artists are looking toward placement of their music in television commercials as both a potential revenue stream and a publicity vehicle. However, aside from economic drawbacks (including low synchronization fees and the limited life of any given ad), a cultural danger of such strategies is incentivizing musical creation to be advertising friendly. In fact, mentions of brands in songs have increased historically, with rap/hip-hop/R&B being especially pronounced in their use of brand-infused lyrics (de Gregorio & Sung, 2009).

Marketers also use and shape music for their own promotional purposes. Volkswagen upgrades its brand image by using off-beat songs in its commercials, sponsoring musical events including US public television's 2003 documentary series on the blues, and has even released CDs such as Street Mix: Music from the Volkswagen Commercials, Vol. 1 (McIntosh, 2009). Internationally, corporations may sponsor musical events to circumvent policy restrictions on traditional advertising (Patel, Okechukwu, Collin, & Hughes, 2009) and associate with the hipness of global youth culture, although how fans respond to corporate branding may not always be under the branding corporation's control (Carah, 2010).

With sponsorship, product placement, webisodes, and other forms, the above contexts have often encouraged scholars to rethink the very nature of media content, given the unique and hybrid nature of hypercommercialism. The next section explores how the concept of the commercial “text” has been reconceptualized.

The Complex Nature of the Hypercommercial Text

For the most part, the main commercial text that scholars have studied is the advertisement: the full-page magazine advertisement or the 30-second television commercial. Many influential and insightful examples of studies examine the semiotic and ideological components of this conventional advertising text (Goldman, 1992; Williamson, 1978).

But by its very nature, hypercommercial content blends discrete forms of culture into a larger promotional mix that is difficult to clearly separate. Commercials, promotions, programs, movies, and other forms are stirred in a textual soup where, in everyday experience and increasingly in industrial practice, they are parts of a promotional whole. As surveyed below, scholars have made adjustments given the prevalence of hypercommercialized forms and are increasingly studying promotional media not as a series of isolated commercials, promotions, or films but as a semiotic integration.

We see this in the large-scale promotional mix of synergistic media brands. The cross-media and coordinated licensing elements of synergistic corporate media lead to “commodity intertexts,” or various versions of brands (or texts) such as Batman that appear in different media like film, TV, comic books, books, music, videogames, and theme-park rides (Meehan, 1991). These intertextual licenses serve as revenue generators and as cross-media promotions for each other (Hardy, 2010). Media corporations thus promote licenses with as many of their owned media outlets as possible. Increasingly such intertexts are not just cross-media duplicates (images of Batman in various media) but advance an integrated metanarrative throughout the different versions, a marketing and narrative strategy labeled as “intertextual flow” (Proffitt, Tchoi, & McAllister, 2007) and “trans-media storytelling” (Jenkins, 2006). In such cases fans will miss out on a backstory, character motivation, or subplot development if they do not acquire all of the licensed manifestations. With the Matrix franchise, for example, the movies alone did not add to the official narrative arc of the story – so did the animated release The Animatrix, the Enter the Matrix videogame, and various “loaded” versions of Matrix DVDs.

A related but even broader concept is that of the “paratext” (Gray, 2010). Gray argues that increasingly media texts are supplemented – or even potentially subordinated – by related texts that promote, comment upon, and influence the meaning of those “original” texts. Although paratexts for media are not new – movie trailers are one early example – digital media have perpetuated them. Promotional “making of” features on DVDs can both influence the potential meanings of films and add “aura” or credibility to the film by discursively constructing the film as a great piece of art.

The paratext is a useful concept for other kinds of hypercommercial content besides media promotion. Increasingly, forms of advertising are being supplemented with their own paratexts that not only distribute the commercial message more widely, but also add legitimacy to the advertising message. For example, high-profile advertising campaigns like for the Toyota Prius (the “Harmony” campaign) often produce their own “making of” documentary features about the campaigns that are distributed on their branded websites and throughout video-sharing sites like YouTube. Such features serve several functions, including promoting the advertising agency and specific personnel that created an ad. But an important function is to influence potential interpretations of the ads so that the ads' persuasive and ideological functions are de-emphasized, and their artistic and filmic characteristics are highlighted (McAllister, 2011).

Digital production and distribution have encouraged another type of commercial paratext: user-generated content, much of which is commercially based, including its most intense form, the user-generated commercial (UGC). Typically in these cases a marketer will hold a contest that invites consumers (presumably “fans” of the brand) to submit a homemade commercial for the brand, posting the submissions to a website where other consumers/fans comment and vote on the UGCs. A contest for Dove Body Wash attracted thousands of submissions, brought visitors to the contest site, generated media publicity for the winning ad that aired during the 2008 Oscar broadcast, and embedded the contest and UGCs in a discourse of feminist empowerment and artistic achievement (Duffy, 2010). This last strategy converges with comparable themes in “making of” documentaries of ad campaigns that seek to elevate the cultural status of the brand and campaign.

Similarly, social networking sites like Facebook provide advertisers with unique opportunities to capitalize on free consumer-provided labor (Cohen, 2008), including user-generated praise for brands on Facebook pages or “fanning/liking” the pages of companies or even advertising mascots. This user-generated activity adds to the credibility of branded Facebook pages and spreads the brand to other Facebook friends' pages. Data that are mined from social networking profiles allow ads to be precisely targeted, blurring user content with the ad messages and obscuring the fact that the site is structured to steer users toward sponsored groups (Morrisey, 2006).

Other commercial forms of hybridity complicate how one conceptualizes the idea of the “main” commercial text. Budd, Craig, and Steinman (1999) argue that the similar styles and icons between network television and television commercials – including product placement and shared acting talent in ads and programs – can be viewed as a giant “commodity flow” where viewers are encouraged to understand connections between different content forms and see them as interconnected. Similarly, kids' television's mix of corporate branding, commercials, licensed programming, and cross-promotion often obliterates differences between promotional and nonpromotional categories as these forms flow into each other. In one three-hour block of programming on ABC Saturday morning in 2002, for example, the word Disney was said or shown 178 times in various content categories such as opening/closing credits for licensed-based programs, branded program separators, product ads, and program promotions (McAllister & Giglio, 2005).

As implied by the above, specific contexts in which hybrid commercial texts are embedded are important and complicate commercial scholarship. Although the availability of television programs and movies on DVDs facilitates the study of such texts compared to the days of nonrecordable film and television, it also encourages a tendency toward decontextualization of the texts from specific commercial contexts of reception. Watching a film on DVD removes it from the commercial and promotional paratexts of the theatrical setting, and adds potentially very different paratexts. Even more dramatically, studying a commercial network television program through a DVD release, iTunes file, or video-sharing website takes that program away from its original context in which specific ads and promotions surrounded the program. For research that focuses on hypercommercialized qualities, this context may be critical for understanding initial meaning formation around integrated commercial messages. The following section describes one such example where the context of commercial paratexts matters.

Commercial Paratexts and Contexts in 30 Rock

Cross-promotions between product advertisers and media companies generate paratexts that add meaning to traditional advertising messages. In the case of the product advertiser, the association with a TV show or movie helps to legitimize and glamorize the brand. But the flow of meanings works both ways. The coordinated and cross-promoted advertising messages may also serve as paratexts to the media texts, changing or altering the meanings of the film or television program.

Take, for example, the use of parody about product placement in a November 16, 2006 episode, “Jack-Tor,” of the television program 30 Rock. As a program co-produced by NBC Studios and NBC Universal Television and distributed by the NBC network, 30 Rock results from vertical integration – with producer and network being owned by the same company. Given that in the economic structure of network television advertisers pay the networks directly, the combined producer/distributor role makes the program more easily accessible by advertisers than programs produced independently of the network (an increasingly rare characteristic).

This particular episode opens with main character Liz Lemon and the other producers and writers of the “show-within-a-show” on 30 Rock, TGS, listening to a video presentation for a new initiative by Jack Donaghy, the NBC executive who supervises TGS. At this time, GE owned NBC (a network now owned by Comcast). In the video, Jack says:

Once the video is over, those around the table react indignantly, although comically contradictorily, to the new initiative:

LIZ:	I'm sorry, you're saying you want us to use the show to sell stuff?
JACK:	Look, I know how this sounds.
LIZ:	No, come on Jack. We're not doing that. We're not compromising the integrity of the show to sell . . .
PETER [drinking a Snapple]:	Wow! This is diet Snapple?!
LIZ [smiling broadly]:	I know! It tastes just like regular Snapple, doesn't it?
FRANK:	You should try Plum-a-Granate. It's amazing.
CERIE [directly at the camera]:	I only date guys who drink Snapple.
JACK:	Look, we all love Snapple. Lord knows, I do. But focus here. We're talking about product integration.
LIZ:	No, we're not your shills.
JACK:	Oh, oh, I'm sorry. That's right, they're artists, like James Joyce or Strindberg. Get real, kids, you write skits mocking our presidents to fill time between car commercials.
LIZ:	That's not fair. Josh gets a lot of fan mail for Gaybraham Lincoln.
JOSH [in an effeminate voice]:	Four score and seven beers ago.
LIZ [looking at a Snapple cap]:	Guys know that Holland is the only country with a national dog? There's little facts in there.

The use of parody of product placement has a fairly long tradition, going back at least to the 1992 movie Wayne's World and continuing through the earlier mentioned Pom Wonderful Presents . . . In the case of 30 Rock, the scene comments on two forms of promotional intrusion on television programming: synergistic corporate ownership and product placement from external corporations. Here the “joke” is that, although the character of “Liz Lemon” expresses outrage at the over-the-top mandate to use the euphemistically labeled “pos-mens” as a form of GE corporate ownership synergy, the corporate commodity that is “Liz Lemon” (as well as all of the characters in the scene) becomes subservient to another form of commercialism, product placement from the external brand, Snapple. Five characters often at odds with one another in the program – Liz, Jack, Peter, Frank, Cerie – unite in their love of Snapple. One could take this scene as a vicious comment on selling out; the characters are not even aware of their contradictions, although these contradictions are clearly being signaled to the audience (Jack later in the episode calls such self-referential comedy “hippie humor”).

Although amusing, the scene's stance on product placement is contradictory. For example, how might we interpret Jack's earnest criticism of the television staff's claim of moral purity, and their response to this criticism? He is arguably framed in the debate as a voice of reason. He contends that for them to think of themselves as having artistic integrity as television workers is delusional; they instead produce puerile entertainment that caters to the lowest impulses of the masses, a criticism that Josh then confirms with his Gaybraham Lincoln gag. Jack's point about TV being a sell-out medium is of course further justified by the Snapple “shilling” that occurs before and after his counterpunch, a shilling in which Jack himself willingly participates. (A later scene in the episode briefly shows a man in a Snapple costume asking directions for the Human Resources department of NBC.) Jack's scolding therefore offers a corporate perspective and takes a little of the bite out of the point of the parody: if TV is already a medium of selling out, what difference do a few “pos-mens” make?

This particular episode – airing early in the show's run – was reviewed quite a bit in newspapers and online. A few television critics at the time – perhaps watching prebroadcast DVDs sent to them by NBC to encourage reviews for the new show – commented on the scene's conflicting messages. Put another way, the reviewers are noting the scene's multiple “polysemic” meanings. Tom Shales of the Washington Post interpreted the scene as “shaky,” unclear, and perhaps positioning the viewer with Jack:

Another reviewer critically noted the promotional benefits of even a parodist representation: “The only problem with sitcoms asking us to contemplate ‘stuff’ is that the way they do it forces us to think even more about the things they're selling. This is not just irony, it's bottomless, grinning cynicism” (Dailey, 2006, p. A2).

For fans who posted reviews for this episode on such sites as tv.com and imdb.com, the parodies were judged by their humor, not their critique. From imdb, for example, one fan wrote, “The Snapple gag didn't make me laugh at first until it emerged for a second time unexpectedly,” while another offered, “Funniest scenes were when Liz refused to sell out, she and the other characters were suddenly plugging the Snapple drinks culminating in a walk-on by someone wearing a Snapple costume.” On tv.com, a fan wrote, “I loved the jokes about product placement, so much so that I've since shown that part to a few friends.”

But why Snapple? Was Snapple just an absurd brand to parody (“Plum-a-Granate”), or was there another reason Snapple was used? The scene itself is unclear on this, and therefore a viewing of this scene on DVD, or even as a rerun later in the season, that does not include the original commercials would leave this question open. However, this question was answered in another venue: the original broadcast of this episode in 2006 that did include commercials. Aside from the polysemic or humorous stance of the scene itself, the flow of commercial messages in this original broadcast is another factor that may influence the critical interpretation of the scene.

The above-described Snapple scene functions as the opening pre-credits sequence (or “cold open”). After Liz expresses her amazement at the Snapple-provided Holland-dog factoid, the program immediately cuts to its opening credits. Then, the first commercial after this break is an ad for Snapple, shot in a quirky style not unlike that of 30 Rock.

Just as Gray (2010) argues that one effect of paratexts is to reinforce “preferred” interpretations of primary texts, here then the commercial that follows the opening scene reinforces that Snapple was a friendly and like-minded business partner of NBC, and that the parody of product placement arises from a product placement deal, and is therefore not a fundamental criticism.

As a paratext, this commercial tie-in may influence a critical reading. For example, another television reviewer, commenting in her blog and clearly watching the real-time broadcast version, noted the role of the Snapple commercial in altering her interpretation of the opening scene: “Last night's episode was fun, especially the Snapple bit, though it was kind of ruined when they cut to a commercial break and there was an actual Snapple commercial. I felt like I'd been set up and I don't like feeling set up” (de Moraes, 2006). In this case, the reviewer overtly signals that the commercial paratext aired during the original broadcast context influenced her interpretation. For others with similar interpretative schemas, such a feeling of being set up may make it difficult to trust any discussion of brands or commodities in advertising-supported media. How do we know that any mention, review, examination, parody is not a result of a cross-promotion?

In fact, as de Moraes suspected, the Snapple placement was part of a larger campaign by Snapple's parent company, at that time named cadbury-Schweppes, that year. What may be especially surprising about this deal is how cheaply NBC sold out its program. According to one trade article, the cross-promotion required that “the company neither pays any additional fees for integration nor does it have to increase its network media buys,” although Snapple point-of-purchase displays may have promoted the tie-in, thus “sweetening the pot” (Schiller, 2007).

Given the economic relationship, we may also ask about the meanings that the paratextual relationship has for the commercial marketer. In Snapple's case, to what extent does it enhance Snapple's brand when the brand is in on the joke (when it is also aware of the self-reflexive “hippie humor”), especially since the marketer chose a commercial that was similar in style to the program in which it was embedded? Although de Moraes, as a professional TV writer, was turned off by the commercial paratext, other viewers may have found it delightful that Snapple was in on the joke, as the Snapple commercial potentially signaled: the company is hip enough to make fun of itself and even uses the same sort of humor itself – a style of humor that presumably is enjoyed by 30 Rock fans. None of the online fans quoted above indicated their reaction to the program-commercial combination, so it is unclear to what extent they may be noticed or been influenced by it.

A later 30 Rock example also illustrates how the textual relations between media and commercial texts may influence meanings and even make it difficult to hierarchize such texts as “para” or “primary” (as Gray argues is problematic for modern media texts generally). A commercial airing during a March 2010 episode was somewhat hyperbolically labeled by the trade journal Advertising Age as a “new direction” in ad-media cross-promotions and signaled “the day when commercials are indistinguishable from the programs they support finally arrived” (Steinberg, 2010). This commercial for Dr. Pepper (part of the same Snapple corporation) featured comedic actor Chris Parnell as Dr. Spaceman, the good-natured but inept 30 Rock character who says the tagline of the then-current campaign (“Trust me, I'm a doctor . . .”) but adds a particularly 30 Rock-esque touch (“. . . in seven states and Bermuda”).

In this case, it was the commercial that copied the noncommercial text, having the character evoke the same goofy persona in an ad as he does in a 30 Rock episode. In this case, then, the program serves as a fairly explicit paratext for the commercial. Although the ad can be understood without any textual knowledge of 30 Rock, that intertextual knowledge arguably makes the commercial funnier as one immediately recognizes the Spaceman's character and humor. This is true whether the ad is viewed in its original broadcast context or on YouTube. But because the commercial first debuted during a 30 Rock episode, that context reinforced the similarity between the commercial and the program. Even though apparently the specific 30 Rock production company was not involved in the making of the commercial (Steinberg, 2010), the overall visual style and soundtrack of the commercial mimicked the program. In this way, the commercial was more similar in its style to the episode than to other ads in this campaign. That a more traditional Dr. Pepper commercial in that same campaign also aired during the same episode both reinforced the connection between the program and its sponsor, and signaled the “designer” nature (Deery, 2004) of the Spaceman ad where it references the specific program in which it is embedded as a special variation on this connection.

Other product integration/ad spot deals appear on 30 Rock, some without such an ironic frame as in the first season. A February 2009 episode featured McDonald's McFlurries as a key plot device (Jack: “These McFlurries are amazing!”) with McDonald's commercials airing during the program, and a May 2009 episode mentioned the Universal (and NBC sibling) film Mamma Mia! (with Liz calling it “the international film song-sation!”) followed by a commercial for the DVD.

By no means was 30 Rock alone in such commercial tie-ins. Its sibling program The Office had similar textual connections to ads for Chili's restaurants, the iPod, and Staples office supplies, and the much-loved Fox television show Arrested Development struck a similar deal with Burger King integrated into a 2005 episode. Increasingly corporate-driven media view such commercial intrusiveness as a necessary condition for profit maximization.

Conclusion: Interactive Product Placement and Antimarketing Blowback

This chapter has reviewed trends in hypercommercial media content. It focused on different content genres such as film and television, sports, children's content, news, and music to discuss how hypercommercial influences cut across different types of content. The chapter also explored the multifaceted characteristics of hypercommercial and hyperpromotional texts, including their “messy” nature as a text and integration of related hypercommercial paratexts and the importance of studying such texts in different contexts. Given the traditional tools at the disposal of marketers – commercials, promotions, sponsorship, and product placement/integration among them – and their varied use, scholars should use care to understand how these tools may vary in different outlets.

Such texts and trends will continue to be a major influence in our media culture, and may intensify in the near future. The chapter has mostly focused on how hyper-commercial content integrates advertising influences into what historically are considered noncommercial content forms. But the Internet and other digital media forms have added additional characteristics that may be blended into hypercommercialism even beyond web surfing. A characteristic of the Internet is its combination of selling and e-commerce, as sites like amazon.com can place promotions for products on the same screen as purchasing capabilities (Spurgeon, 2008). The data-mining nature of the Internet also means that such sites can target specific promotional appeals based upon the previous and current surfing patterns and purchasing history of the web user.

What we may be seeing as we move toward digitization is an accompanying commercialized future. Take television as an example, and certain precedents that ultimately could be models for a new hypercommercial model. As previously mentioned, home shopping channels integrate viewing with purchasing (Cook, 2000). Additionally, “enhanced” format reality television like Big Brother allows viewers to offer feedback about outcomes, a form of interaction that is consumption-based (Nightingale & Dwyer, 2006). As television becomes more Internet-like, it may continue in these directions by integrating interactivity and e-commerce capability not just within advertising forms, but even within programming forms. We may see the technological capability to purchase products featured in programs, a capability that, once enacted, may then be expected by advertisers as a routine part of television. In addition, the ability of television to collect data about media use to create targeted advertising messages – as the Internet now routinely offers – could continue to be folded into advertising logic and expectations of television and other media (Andrejevic, 2009). So, our hypercommercialized television screen of the future may include the ability to purchase not just generic products that are integrated into television programs, but even targeted products that are digitally inserted for particular viewers based upon their consumer data profile. In these cases the influence of advertising upon programming decisions will be fundamental and intimate, and will create even more commercialized contexts that may vary not just by medium or type of commodification, but even by individual user.

Other forces can stem the tide of an increasingly hypercommercialized future. Concerns about the future of journalism have triggered conversations among policymakers about alternative funding sources besides advertising (McChesney & Nichols, 2010). Privacy concerns may also influence the creation of more restrictive policy toward data collection as such models expand beyond the Internet. And as Klein (1999) has documented, when corporations overreach their social authority, people can fight back. Culture jammers, public protests, and political movements can result from groups angered by the very visible nature of overly aggressive corporate branding. Klein's focus on such trends in the 1990s perhaps captured a particular historical moment and was more about the corporate takeover of public space than about media content. Nevertheless, her work serves as a model for democratic blow-back in an era of YouTube and social networking sites that can be used for political organization as well as for integrated marketing. A digitized media future may offer more variants of hypercommercial content, but also can offer anticommercial advocates more tools for protest as well.

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