Abstract

Advertising and promotional culture are in the throes of rapid transformation and rethinking, both within the advertising, marketing and media industries, and in the minds of the scholars who describe, analyze, and critique these cultural forms. It seems that, everywhere we look, boundaries and categories that once seemed fixed and know-able are blurring and destabilizing. Practitioners and scholars are rethinking the boundaries between media content and promotion, promotion and advertising, advertiser and audience, community and target market. Advertisers have always sought to insinuate themselves into daily life, but transformations in media technologies, government regulations, economic incentives, and cultural values are opening up new frontiers. Branding and commoditization seem to penetrate our personal lives more than ever, as represented by discourses of personal branding and the exploding market in personal data generated by our online activities.