Page 192 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

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hyPerCoMMerCialisM

The landscape of popular culture is cluttered with on air commercial messages
and many media analysts and public interest groups charge that advertising,
promotion, corporate slogans and icons have become inescapable intrusions on
everyday life. The trend toward weaving advertising and promotion into the fab-
ric of mainstream media has been termed hypercommercialism and describes
the increasing prevalence of sales and marketing in all aspects of media pro-
duction and structure. Product branding has been recognizable for decades,
but now “branded entertainment” embeds advertising into the design of enter-
tainment programs themselves. Along the way, television is transformed into a
marketing tool and viewers become consumers of products, not audiences to
be entertained. Media managers argue that combining entertainment and sales
will satisfy the public, if done with skill and ingenuity. Critics counter that the
consequences of hypercommercialism extend to the foundations of American
democracy, because such practices affect news programming and press report-
ing, as well as entertainment genres. The parameters of hypercommercialism are
in constant flux, changing with new ownership structures, media technologies,
marketing philosophies, symbolic techniques, and production formats, all of
which make contemporary commercial culture a dynamic realm, and a battle-
ground issue, from critical and cultural perspectives.

ThE CommErCiaL mEDia
The economics of TV has had a particular historical trajectory. When com-
mercial interests won the battle over broadcasting in the 1920s, it was decided

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