Advertising | Branding & Technological Convergence

Advertisement is the ways in which their products are promoted so that it is persuading enough for consumers to buy. Different companies have various ways of advertising and many features included so I am going to focus on them in this post.


To start off, the different ways that companies may choose to advertise would be:

• Posters
• Billboard
• Magazine/Magazine
• Social Media
• Commercials
• Radio
• Celebrity Endorsement
• Trailers
• Sponsors

Companies need a brand where consumers can instantly know what products they sell and what that company is about. A brand is a type of product manufactured by a particular company under a particular name, for example; Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Adidas and Cadbury to name a few.




At a point there were 50 large companies who were involved in Cross Media Convergence/ Horizontal Integration This would mean that the companies would own different networks like music, news, film, transport, gaming, video etc. so that money would stay in-house and have exposure on all platforms. Overtime these companies decreased into 4 major labels; Universal, Warner, Sony and EMI which now is owned by Universal. These labels have a advantage as they have collective intelligence where if they are putting together a film, they have specific departments to collaborate who are expertise in that area.




There is also Vertical Integration which is slightly different as it is when companies own certain facilities to produce their products instead of using an outside source.






An example of a cross media link with Sony would be the James Bond franchise owned by Sony as well as Adele who sang the official theme song for one of the films which was also owned by Sony.

Now with a majority of films and music being streamed online for free illegally, these big companies had to find an alternative way of meeting the needs of the consumers as well as making a profit. What companies decided was to publish their music and movies online where it could be streamed for free, however the consumers would either have to pay a fee to download it or include advertisements in intervals so that it could afford being played for free.

The reason for these changes is because of the evolution of technology where we have evolved from web 1.0 to web 2.0.

Web 1.0 around 1996 was a read only web where you could only receive information from around 250,000 sites and approximately 45 million global users. Web 2.0 in comparison has a significant difference where people were able to also produce their own ideas and upload them online, this increased the site count to around 80,000,000 in only 10 years. By this point there were 1+ billion users and is still growing rapidly.

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Convergence theory by Henry Jenkins states that there is a pressure for companies and consumers to work together to produce new media.

He believes that there is a category for new media created by companies to make people's lives easier and making things better accessed, e.g. oyster cards, online magazines, Netflix, online banking etc. Although this category is pretty vast there is also a category  for active audiences where they would develop this ideas further to create things like parodies of existing videos, memes and even independent online shopping where they can sell their own items.

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To link back to Cross Media Convergence, there is also something called a conglomerate where one company owns a controlling stake in a number of smaller companies, which conduct business separately. This is useful when you are really trying to get something across to the consumer, they may choose to use these other companies to sell their brand through synergy. Synergy could be simply done through a TV commercial where they use product placement to slyly advertise without you even realising. Here's an example: