The term advertainment was coined to reflect the increasingly intertwined connections between advertising and entertainment. It refers to promotional practices that integrate brand communications within the content of entertainment products. Brand communications are now present in the content of a broad range of entertainment vehicles, including TV and movies, radio shows, songs and music videos, video games, plays, and even novels.

The increased mingling of advertising with the entertainment world has generated a slue of newly coined terms to reflect these trends, such as hybrid advertisement.

Factors Fueling the Growth of Advertainment

Advertainment has grown mainly in reaction to the increasing advertising clutter, escalating advertising costs, and the reduced effectiveness of traditional advertising messages.
Consumers are exponentially exposed to commercial messages but at the same time they are finding
new ways to avoid them. An In-Stat/MDR survey found that 54.3% of consumers claim to
skip 75-100% of commercials5. In 2004, a Knowledge Networks study concluded that 47% of viewers switch channels while watching TV5. The same study also determined that the proportion of viewers
doing other activities while watching TV -such as eating, reading, or using the internet -increased from 67% in 2004 to 75% in 2004.

Advertainment can be classified based on the degree of integration of the brand in the entertainment content, represented below on the horizontal axis.

There is a general consensus that advertainment can bring strategic benefits linked to the implied endorsement obtained from having a brand associated with a celebrity. By building an association with a

celebrity, product placements and integrations benefit from the credibility and trust that the celebrity brings to the brand.

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