Jonathan Gray (Ph.D. London, United Kingdom) is Assistant Professor of Communication & Media Studies at Fordham University. He is the author of the forthcoming Show Sold Separately: Film, Television, and Off-Screen Studies (NYU, 2009), along with Television Entertainment (Routledge, 2008) and Watching With The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality (Routledge, 2006). He is also co-editor of the forthcoming Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era (NYU, 2009), as well as Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World (NYU Press, 2007), Battleground: The Media (Greenwood, 2008), and Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture. Gray sits on the editorial boards of International Journal of Cultural Studies and Critical Studies in Media Communication, and has published in multiple books and journals. He studies hype, synergy, and paratexts; the intertextual nature of the interaction between media text and audience; entertainment's role in the public sphere; comedy, satire, and parody; fandom and antifandom. Growing up in Canada, England, Australia, Singapore, and Hong Kong, he has long been interested in international media and media flows, too, and recently began work on a study of Malawian media.

Critics generally regard promotional culture as exploitative, propagandistic, and the essence of superficiality: "only so much hype." It is seen as the media equivalent of the used car salesman, or of the PR firm that sells wars. However, promotional culture produces not just profits, dupes, and the ills of capitalism, but also engagement and interest, meanings, and interpretive introductions to much of the culture that critics generally regard as more legitimate, artistic, and uplifting. Promotional culture, in other words, is culture, not just promotional.

Indeed, in the realm of film and television, promotional culture is often a key and indistinguishable part of the artistic product. Behind corporate conglomerates' horizontal and vertical integration and plans for synergistic conquest of the audience are frequently computer games, posters, ad campaigns, merchandise lines, toys, and trailers that are active sites for both the creation and the consumption and enjoyment of the narrative. Children playing with Star Wars toys are hardly likely to see themselves as engaging with "promotional" culture, and instead regard the toys as part of the world of Star Wars, and so too with adults struggling to "beat" a computer game or alternate reality game, discussing a show on its corporate created discussion site, or rifling through bonus materials on a DVD. In an age of convergence, the supposedly hard line between promotion (as the assumed bad element of culture) and art (as the assumed positive element) has become decreasingly easy to discern, even as media, cultural, and communication studies scholarship and pedagogy still often cling to and reify the distinction.

In challenging the promotion/art binary, it is by no means my intention to serve as apologist for Madison Avenue; academic and popular critiques of promotional culture are often well-founded and necessary. Instead, my purpose is to interrogate the ways in which we delineate often too crudely between culture that "matters" and that is worthy of study as a site for engagement and the creation of meaning, and culture that is "just" advertising. Focusing on how this duality works with promotional culture surrounding film and television properties, I will examine the ways in which hype can create meaning, not just an annoyance. From trailers to toys, computer games to spinoffs, web sites to DVD bonus materials, podcasts to discussion sites, posters to alternate reality games, today's movies and television shows are regularly surrounded by a large entourage of promotional culture. I will argue that this entourage plays a large role in creating the popular image, and hence meaning, of these films and shows. Drawing examples from The Simpsons, Lord of the Rings, The Dark Knight, Heroes, and other contemporary films and television shows, the paper studies how promotional culture and art are merging, and how the work of art is often performed, albeit to varying levels of success, by promotional culture.