Genre analysis of covert marketing in Malaysian Instagram reels

The contemporary world has led to the mushrooming of social media where various platforms and formats are utilized for marketing purposes. Consumers encounter many advertising messages daily, making it crucial for marketers to find ways to cut through the clutter. Covert marketing is increasingly adopted as a strategy to successfully overcome this challenge by advertising products and brands, specifically through video clips, better known as Reels. Through a genre analysis approach, this study is aimed at investigating Instagram’s covert marketing strategy via ‘Reels’ as a genre and examining how marketers and content creators have utilized this platform to commercialize products. Guided by Bhatia’s (2004) interdiscursivity theory in genres and Li et al.,’s (2022) framework for analyzing covert marketing video clips, the rhetorical moves and structures of the covert marketing Reels are examined to unmask their communicative purposes. Twenty Instagram Reels published under the accounts of Malaysian social media influencers are selected for analysis, in which their moves and frequency are identified and recorded. The findings revealed the implicit nature of advertising and the persistent use of interdiscursive strategies by advertisers or influencers for the artistic advertising of products. While Li et al. (2022) offered a foundation model of covert marketing moves in the Chinese Douyin platform, this study extends the analytical focus to the Malaysian Instagram Reels context, where sociocultural and linguistic dynamics may shape the genre differently. This cross-contextual perspective provides insight into how genre practices are appropriated and recontextualised in regional settings, especially within Southeast Asian influencer ecosystems. The paper contributes to the dearth of research on covert marketing genres and addresses the booming prevalence of Reels and short video marketing as a noteworthy digital genre in related professions. Pedagogical implications to the English for Specific Purposes related to business, marketing and communication fields are given.