Expanding the Agenda of Research on Product Placement: A Commercial Intertext

Research on product placement, the integration of brands/products within entertainment content, has flourished over the past three decades, culminating in several review articles. This article conceptualizes product placement as a commercial intertext to enable the development of novel research questions that account for the interconnections of the placement and a web of intertextual connections. Contextualizing product placement as a message within a system of sociocultural, marketing communications, and textual cross-references opens new opportunities for research that extend beyond the well-documented executional characteristics of the placement. Illustrative research questions are proposed.