Cultural Mediations of Brands

2The Media Opportunism of Brands and Its Silences

The medium used to promote a brand is not insignificant. It has virtues that provide opportunities to promote brands.

The editorial form – whether a magazine, newspaper or program – is invested in because it constitutes a unique project, supported by a specific writing platform: paper, television or computer screen.

The case of the paper press as the communication and media model chosen to promote a brand is favored for analysis. The press gradually carries values: textual value linked to the communicative virtues of paper and writing, relational value linked to the virtues of a genre, and finally social value linked to the virtues of a power to express a world order. It is intensely charged with a social memory, a major object of the influence for brand development.

2.1. Virtues of inscription-embodiment material and editorial design

Traditional press paper is an apparently banal material, as it is so common and ever-present, but it contains a value in the communication of brands when they appropriate the media form of a magazine.

Today, paper is often associated with a certain passivity because it is emblematic of a communication thought of as obsolete since the advent of the Internet; it has indeed suffered from the progression of audiovisual media, renowned for their technicality, their modernity, and their possibilities for “interaction”. Nevertheless, it remains an essential “classic” of communication, haloed with its ...