Insider/Outsider Schizophrenia: The Spatial Identity of Entertainment Marketers

• In Event: ICA Plenary Interactive Paper/Poster Session and Reception
  In Interactive Paper Session: Popular Communication Interactive Paper Session

Abstract

Despite their crucial role in Hollywood, entertainment marketing firms remain partial industry outsiders due to their independent ownership, generally small size, subordination as service providers, circumscribed role within the larger filmmaking process, and lack of public credit. Compounding this fraught position, they must also struggle to straddle the ubiquitous art/commerce divide, as they are tasked with creating art specifically for commercial use by Hollywood marketing departments. Entertainment marketers thus function within a professional borderland, continually negotiating the binaries of insider/outsider and commerce/art. This paper explores the ways in which these firms use spatially-contingent social and cultural capital to construct a preferred corporate identity and leverage their liminal status.

Author

• Katherine Felsburg Wong, University of Pennsylvania