Entertainment Media: Times of Branded Content

Introduction

In contemporary society, leisure time is a sort entertainment time, since people amuse themselves in their free time with a range of entertainment offers produced by a set of creative industries that comprise the entertainment industry, representing a capitalist system of production in which the media are a very important player.

Media consumption is part of everyday life and an important part of leisure time, shaping cultural identities in a global context of media culture in which media are the primary disseminators of popular texts and thus, trends and consumption, using advertising and, currently, new advertising forms and formats that integrate editorial content, shaping media content hybridization, that we will further approach.

In this sense, the content being produced by media helps individuals to organize their leisure time, providing orientation and advice. We have long passed times of pure discussion of social uses and media functions: information and surveillance, setting the agenda and acting as a community forum that gave way to subjection to the economic and political system, holding the society together through entertainment propositions. Although media still portray a very important role in society, framing social problems and cultural issues, these are today dependent on corporate agendas. We observe media dismissing themselves from accomplishing public interest, becoming representatives for finding constant new efficient ways to communicate corporate information without, however, letting audiences be aware of it, framing a supposed world of joy and consumption.

Borrowing theoretical contributions rooted in critical work of Theodor Adorno (1947) to question entertainment as an extension of work and an escape from thinking about automated manufacturing processes, we focus on other academic literature to enrich our proposal, relating media studies with technology and marketing. For instance, Kung-Shankelman (2000); Kung (2004); Albarran (1996, 2010); Napoli (2003); Caves (2000, 2005) and Beck (2003); Hendy (2000); Rifkin (2000) and Mitchel et all (2009); Jenkins (2006), about media audiences and media industry; Deuze (2007, 2010), for the cultural and technological convergence of media and creative industries, as well as Gauntlet’s work (2000, 2004, 2007) relating everyday life, business and economics, enhancing, as well, creativity and community (Gauntlet, 2011). Communities are approached through research on online brand communities, following Cecília e Palazón (2008); Quinton e Harridge-March (2010); Ouwersloot e Odekerken-Schroder (2008); Wu e Sukoko (2010) as well as Schouten e McAlexander (1995); Muniz e O’Guinn (2001); McAlexander, Schouten e Koening (2002); Kates (2004), research on branding from a consumer perspective.