BOOKS

Television Brandcasting:
The Return of the Content-Promotion Hybrid

Routledge, 2015

In this follow-up to her successful previous book, Television and New Media: Must-Click TV, Gillan provides vital insights into television’s role in the expansion of a brand-centric U.S. culture.

Television Brandcasting examines U. S. television’s utility as a medium for branded storytelling. It investigates the current and historical role that television content, promotion, and hybrids of the two have played in disseminating brand messaging and influencing consumer decision-making. Juxtaposing the current period of transition with that of the 1950s-1960s, Jennifer Gillan outlines how in each era new technologies unsettled entrenched business models, an emergent viewing platform threatened to undermine an established one, and content providers worried over the behavior of once-dependable audiences. The anxieties led to storytelling, promotion, and advertising experiments, including the Disneyland series, embedded rock music videos in Ozzie & Harriet, credit sequence brand integration, Modern Family’s parent company promotion episodes, second screen initiatives, and social TV experiments. Offering contemporary and classic examples from the American Broadcasting Company, Disney Channel, ABC Family, and Showtime, alongside series such as Bewitched, Leave it to Beaver, Laverne & Shirley, and Pretty Little Liars, individual chapters focus on brandcasting at the level of the television series, network schedule, "Blu-ray/DVD/Digital" combo pack, the promotional short, the cause marketing campaign, and across social media.
Available via Amazon.com

Television and New Media:
Must-Click TV

Routledge, 2011

We watch TV on computers, phones, and other mobile devices; television is now online as much as it is "on air." Television and New Media introduces readers to the ways that new media technologies have transformed contemporary broadcast television production, scheduling, distribution, and reception practices. Drawing upon recent examples including Lost, 24, and Heroes, this book examines the ways that television programming has changed—transforming nearly every TV series into a franchise, whose on-air, online, and on-mobile elements are created simultaneously and held together through a combination of transmedia marketing and storytelling. Television studios strive to keep their audiences in constant interaction with elements of the show franchise in between airings not only to boost ratings, but also to move viewers through the different divisions of a media conglomerate.

Organized around key industrial terms - platforming, networking, tracking, timeshifting, placeshifting, schedule-shifting, micro-segmenting, and channel branding - this book is essential for understanding how creative and industrial forces have worked together to transform the way we watch TV.
Available via Amazon.com

REVIEWS

-  "Must Click TV" review by Lindsay Giggey, on journal.transformativeworks.org

- "From see to click: new patterns of television production and consumption" review by Catarina Duff Burnay for Talaia download pdf 

AS EDITOR

Gillan, J. L, Mazziotti Gillan, M, Giunta, E. (2003). Italian American Writers on New Jersey. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Gillan, J. L, Mazziotti Gillan, M. (1999). Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American. New York: Penguin Books.

Gillan, J. L, Mazziotti Gillan, M. (1999). Identity Lessons: Contemporary Writing About Learning To Be An American. New York: Penguin Books.

Gillan, J. L, Mazziotti Gillan, M. (1994). Unsettling America: A Multicultural Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry. New York: Viking Penguin Books.