ABSTRACT
This chapter presents how shifts in the digital media environment have unsettled distinctions, categories and definitions of screen content. It also examines the status of promotional screen content and a case example where the industrial and textual logics of blurring have played out. Promotional screen content can be broadly located within three areas: screen advertising, film and television marketing, and corporate and organizational promotion. Traditionally, screen advertising has been typified by the thirty-second advertising spot. Emerging as the dominant form of audiovisual advertising in the 1960s, the thirty-second spot separated advertising from the other forms of screen content around which it sat. Developing a different taxonomy, the Branded Content Marketing Association (BCMA) produced a white paper on the age of branded content that proposed six variants, including branded entertainment, advertiser-funded programming, short- or long-form branded vignettes, brand storytelling, branded content partnerships and brand integration.
