Marketers’ influence on media: Renewing the radical tradition for the digital age

The distinctive contribution of critical political economy of media approaches has been to examine the implications of advertising as a system of financing media and the influence of marketers on media content, media provision, and access to communications. Classic contributions examined advertisers influence on non-advertising content and media firms’ behaviour. The problems they identified are of central concern today, but critical political economy theory and analysis needs to be updated to deal with transformations in the ways marketing communications are produced and circulated within the changing dynamics of media-advertising relationships. Key features include the expansion of marketers’ self-promotion (‘owned’ media), the ‘disaggregation’ of media and advertising, as marketers bypass media to target and reach consumers directly through online behavioural advertising, and the ‘integration’ of media and advertising through product placement, sponsored stories and native advertising (Turow 2011; Hardy 2013). This chapter explores the strengths and limitations of political economy perspectives and offers guidelines for contemporary analysis and critique of marketer influences on communications.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in Explorations in Critical Studies of Advertising on 26.10.16, available online: http://www.routledge.com/9781138649521