Promotional Screen Industries

In a wide-ranging analysis, Paul Grainge and Catherine Johnson explore the intermediaries – advertising agencies, television promotion specialists, movie trailer houses, digital design companies – that compete and collaborate in the fluid, fast-moving world of promotional screen work.

Through interview-based fieldwork with companies and practitioners based in the UK, US and China, Promotional Screen Industries encourages us to see promotion as a professional and creative discipline with its own opportunities and challenges. Outlining how shifts in the digital media environment have unsettled the boundaries of ‘promotion’ and ‘content’, the authors provide new insight into the sector, work, strategies and imaginaries of contemporary screen promotion.

With case studies on mobile communication, television, film and live events, this timely book offers a compelling examination of the industrial configurations and media forms, such as ads, apps, promos, trailers, digital shorts, branded entertainment and experiential media, that define promotional screen culture at the beginning of the twenty-first century.