Cultural Mediations of Brands

3A Media of One’s Own: Brands and the Struggle for Auctoriality

Media investment through capitalization of social memory has become more professional and has developed to the point of becoming a real market.

Native advertising, as a relatively new phenomenon of brand building, is the emblematic case I have chosen to highlight media appropriation in the service of brands. It shows the communicational mutations because it is a complex example:

• – it is unclear despite the objectivizing nature of the expression that portrays it as a new category, and seeing it brandished prompts us to question the stakes of its epiphany and the beliefs associated with it, linked to the Internet;
• – it highlights the opportunities offered by technological transformations, a pretext for changes in frameworks, and therefore for possible changes in the balance of power and status. Recently, it has made it possible to identify transformations in the media landscape, but also in the organizational landscape of marketing departments and agencies.

3.1. The rise of native advertising

The following account combines an anecdotal experience with journalistic data on the subject to describe the emergence and circulation of a phenomenon in formation. This composite narrative is nevertheless oriented, as the elements mentioned allow me to point out certain facts and raise a certain number of questions to understand what is at stake in this emergence. In this atmosphere of the birth of a phenomenon, the beliefs ...