«Comunicazioni sociali», 2017, n. 1, 13-26 © 2017 Vita e Pensiero / Pubblicazioni dell’Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore MASSIMO SCAGLIONI - GIUSEPPE SUMA* FASHION-BRANDED ENTERTAINMENT How Italian Fashion Brands Utilize Audiovisual Media to Tell Stories and Entertain Audiences Abstract During the last decade, the convergence between advertising and the entertainment industry gave birth to new languages that sought to convey brand values in a more effective way. Alongside traditional advertising formats, such as TV commercials and product placement, a new and more refned form of communication has emerged, which is pointed towards storytelling and enter- tainment: ‘branded entertainment’. Within this context, the fashion industry is a particularly in- teresting area of study. Having been historically bound to the audiovisual media, fashion was immediately able to take advantage of the opportunities provided by this new language, on the one hand establishing a signifcant production of audiovisual content (long-short flms) with an identifable form, aesthetic and language; on the other, producing original entertainment content or integrating its values by expressing them in related TV formats. On the basis of the still few academic studies available so far, the primary aim of this article is to shed light on the use of often imprecise terminology related to branded entertainment, through a systemic approach that defnes its operating range and highlights the distinctive elements which differentiate branded entertainment from any other hybrid forms of communication. Secondly, the paper will focus on the bond between the fashion and media industries and the production models adopted to date, by categorizing and analysing a corpus of 40 cases of ‘fashion branded entertainment’, carried out by Italian fashion brands from 2010 to 2016. Keywords Branded content and entertainment; fashion brands; audiovisual media; brand integration; adver- tising. 1. introduction The act of telling, producing and consuming stories is an anthropological habit of man- kind 1 . In this spirit, brands realized fairly recently that people love stories, and that simply talking about the product no longer suffces to reach their target audience. Today companies no longer advertise and sell just their products, but at the same time they ‘sell stories’ and content that is based on their own values 2 . This shift in perspective mimics * Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore – massimo.scaglioni@unicatt.it, giuseppe.suma@unicatt.it. This essay was discussed and planned jointly by the two authors. Sections 1 and 2 have been written by Massimo Scaglioni; sections 3, 4 and 5 by Giuseppe Suma. 1 J. Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, Boston: Houghton Miffin Har- court, 2012. 2 R.P. Nelli, Content Marketing. Approcci e tendenze nell’esperienza italiana, Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 2016.