Mapping the Media-Marketing Ecology (Branded Content Governance Project, June 2024)

This report, Mapping the Media-Marketing Ecology, is produced by the Branded Content Governance Project, a three-year UKRI-funded international research project. The report examines the actors and processes that make up the media-marketing ecosystem. This is an interim version (June 2024) of a report which will be published in final form in 2025. We want to share work in progress, but will be adding additional material, including a chapter on ‘Creators and intermediaries across the pro-am spectrum’, and an expanded version of ‘Media-marketing ecology: key issues for governance’, that will include our full analysis of branded content ‘problems’ and ‘mitigations’: considerations and recommendations for addressing problems that may be developed in context-sensitive ways to improve the governance of branded content.

This report focuses on mapping the activities and industrial interconnections relevant to the main forms of branded content produced today. In doing so we aim to provide both a more detailed and granular map than exists to date and an analytical overview that situate branded content activities within the wider media-marketing ecosystem.