Television Brandcasting: The Return of the Content Promotion Hybrid by Jennifer Gillan (review)

I was born in 1976, which means I experienced classic TV series like Leave It to Beaver (ABC, 1957–1963), The Partridge Family (ABC, 1970–1974), The Brady Bunch (ABC, 1969–1974), and The Flintstones (ABC, 1960–1966) as reruns watched after school (and before homework). Their syndication throughout the 1980s removed them from their original broadcasting environment of product jingles, branded content-promotion hybrids, and of course other, similarly branded TV series that the channel could deploy to create a unified address to audiences about its brand identity. My viewing experiences lacked what Jennifer Gillan might call their “promotional surround”; instead, Jan Brady (Eve Plumb) and Barney Rubble (Mel Blanc), who first aired in two different decades, were neighbors on my TV—alongside more recent sitcoms like Facts of Life (NBC, 1979–1988), Webster (ABC, 1983–1987), and Diff’rent Strokes (NBC, 1978–1985; ABC, 1985–1986)—surrounded by commercials selling products that Carol Brady (Florence Henderson) and Betty Rubble (Bea Benaderet) couldn’t yet purchase for their families because those products didn’t yet exist (and because Betty lived in prehistoric times!) and were connected to paratexts that would not have made sense during their original runs.¹ In the 1980s it didn’t seem to matter that I was watching these series out of time and out of context, transplanted into a new scheduling context created by the sale of network series to affiliate stations throughout the 1980s. Had I watched these series in their original 1960s promotional surround, I most likely would have done so as a tween or young woman seeking out images of spunky (but not too threatening), stylish (but not too stylish) women (not too young but not too old either) at the center of their own narratives of generational discord. In other words, these series were scheduled to appeal to a specific demographic in the 1960s, one that wished to see modern women in leading roles pursuing their destinies, without rocking the boat too hard, of course. It’s a time-specific address, one that was invisible to me as a young viewer in the 1980s.

This is just one of many insights I gained while reading Jennifer Gillan’s Television Brandcasting: The Return of the Content-Promotion Hybrid, a book-length study about why studying programs’ promotional surround—including scheduling and demographic targeting—is vital to the history of television.² Gillan argues that “analyzing the promotional surround in which television series are embedded can bring to light the cultural aspirations and anxieties exploited in order to attract audiences to series, platforms, and associated advertisers.”³ Acting as a “peer,” networks address their audiences as a friend who understands their desires and recommends TV series, as well as linked consumer goods, on the basis of a presumed understanding of audience desires. Gillan links this “friend and recommend” paradigm, originating in the 1950s, to the way that US TV today imagines its “television stars as close friends of viewers and as spokespeople for corporations that want to represent themselves as friendly entities rather than uncaring monoliths.”⁴ Television Brandcasting also argues that twenty-first-century brands like Disney have repurposed the “content-promotion hybrid” at the heart of television branding in the 1950s and 1960s to meet the needs of the socially mediated, postnetwork, commercial-skipping era. Building on Michael Curtin’s assertion that the network television era is “a symptomatic expression of a social order built upon a historically specific form of capitalism,” Gillan’s monograph uses brandcasting as an important lens through which we can understand this historically specific form of capitalism.⁵

Gillan dedicates her first chapter to establishing how networks work with sponsors to build and promote brands linked to series content. She outlines the brandcasting strategies of canonical TV shows, such as The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet (ABC, 1952–1966) and My Three Sons (ABC, 1960–1965; CBS 1965–1972) from...