Advertising at the threshold: Paratextual promotion in the era of media convergence

In the media convergence era, brands are embracing hybrid forms of advertising communication such as branded content, product placement and sponsored TV ‘pods’, brand blogs, share-able video, programmatic advertising, ‘native’ advertising and more, as alternatives to, and extensions of, traditional mass media advertising campaigns. In this paper we draw on Genette’s (2010) theory of transtextuality to re-frame this phenomenon from a paratextual purview. We suggest that the analogy of the paratext articulates the iterative, ambiguous, participative, and intertextual character of much contemporary brand communication. We describe extended examples of paratextual advertising and promotion that illustrate the fluid and mutually contingent relation of advertising text to paratext, and we outline an analytical framework for future research and practice.