The Hybridisation of Advertising Under Convergence: from text, to paratext, competitive paper, Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) Conference, University of California, Irvine, July 9th -12th 2017 (with R.A.Hackley).

Under media convergence, the strategic attention of global brands is shifting from traditional mass media advertising to hybrid genres such as branded content, product placement, brand blogs, Facebook advertising, sponsored TV ‘pods’, and ‘native’ advertising. The measure of effectiveness of promotional media has also shifted, from passive views to emotionally inflected engagement. In this conceptual paper we draw on literary critic Gérard Genette’s (2010) work on paratexts to re-frame this phenomenon from a literary perspective. We suggest that the analogy of the paratext articulates the iterative, provisional, participative, polysemous, liminal and intertextual character of much contemporary brand communication under media convergence and we outline some of the implications of this new conceptualisation for the analysis of advertising from managerial, literary and social perspectives.