Podvertising : om sponsring i ett nytt medieformat

Sammanfattning: Firstly, the title of this paper is Podvertising: advertising in a new media format (in Swedish: Podvertising: om sponsring i ett nytt medieformat) and the authors are Holger Brundin and Fredrik Bröndum. The paper is authored for Media- and communication studies at The institution for communication and media, Lunds University. The podcast is a fairly new and growing format of media with the internet as its platform of distribution. In comparison to traditional media such as the television or the radio, the podcast is young and the podcast producers are still experimenting with the commercial potential of the format. The commercial podcast had its breakthrough in Sweden as late as 2010. Therefore, no clear rules or guidelines on advertisment exists for the podcast format. Our main question formulations regards how the external sponsors are talked about and presented in the podcast. With this in mind we have chosen a number of theoretical viewpoints to apply on our research and analysis. Our primary theory of choice is the media convergence theory. Thereafter we use theoretical arguments regarding advertorials and study podcasts in the contexts of commerce and history. Methodically, we use a quantitative analysis of content and a text analysis for the qualitative analysis. The results of our analysis, which is predominantly qualitative, shows that the podcast producers often portray their relationship to the sponsor as an amicable one, using words that indicates that they have a close relationship, and the producers prefer to adress their sponsors as friends rather than commercial partners.