Television Brandcasting ― The Return of the Content-promotion Hybrid

Television Brandcasting examines U. S. television’s utility as a medium for branded storytelling. It investigates the current and historical role that television content, promotion, and hybrids of the two have played in disseminating brand messaging and influencing consumer decision-making. Juxtaposing the current period of transition with that of the 1950s-1960s, Jennifer Gillan outlines how in each era new technologies unsettled entrenched business models, an emergent viewing platform threatened to undermine an established one, and content providers worried over the behavior of once-dependable audiences. The anxieties led to storytelling, promotion, and advertising experiments, including the Disneyland series, embedded rock music videos in Ozzie & Harriet, credit sequence brand integration, Modern Family’s parent company promotion episodes, second screen initiatives, and social TV experiments. Offering contemporary and classic examples from the American Broadcasting Company, Disney Channel, ABC Family, and Showtime, alongside series such as Bewitched, Leave it to Beaver, Laverne & Shirley, and Pretty Little Liars, individual chapters focus on brandcasting at the level of the television series, network schedule, "Blu-ray/DVD/Digital" combo pack, the promotional short, the cause marketing campaign, and across social media.

In this follow-up to her successful previous book, Television and New Media: Must-Click TV, Gillan provides vital insights into television’s role in the expansion of a brand-centric U.S. culture.

Jennifer Gillan is Professor of English and Media Studies at Bentley University. She is author of Television and New Media: Must-Click TV (Routledge 2010). Gillan’s articles have appeared in Cinema Journal, American Literature, Arizona Quarterly, Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy, Columbia Journal of Gender & Law, African American Review, American Drama, and Mosaic. She has co-edited four award-winning literature anthologies—Unsettling America, Identity Lessons, and Growing Up Ethnic in America, all from Penguin Books, and Italian American Writers on New Jersey, from Rutgers University Press.