Global Trends in Advertising Campaigns – Integration of Social Media

The paper does not aim to provide practical solutions but only to raise, within the academic community, the following questions: Are the current paradigms of promotional communication still valid? Does a crisis of knowledge intervene in this field? Are new paradigms necessary for instating new research customs able to provide new theories, models, research methods and a new image of this field? The paper thus aims to present the aspects which have determined us to raise these questions: the admission of new concepts, as Through the Line advertising, necessary due to communication hybrids which make the division of some promotion forms into the classical typology – ATL/BTL – impossible; the important mutations on the media market worldwide; the social media revolution, with spectacular results reflected in numbers and statistics; the emergence of global virtual communities with hundreds of million members worldwide, which generated an unprecedented interest of advertising investments in social media.