From John Hood, writing on the FCC vs. product placement in the March Reason:
When Peter Parker shot out his webbing and snagged that can of Dr. Pepper in Spider-Man, its seems that impressionable movie audiences across the country suffered deleterious consequences—perhaps in the form of forgetting how much they loved Mr Pibb. “The public needs to know when they’re being advertised to,” says Jonathan Adelstein, one of the five appointees who run the Federal Comunications Commission. To that end, he wants his agency to require a lengthy disclosure notice during every TV show with paid placements, an effort he believes it can justify with the laws governing payola.
Product placement isn’t a new problem. Indeed, it isn’t even a problem. In the golden age of radio, the republic survived product placement during soap operas and The Jack Benny Program without suffering an epidemic of obesity. (Remember “There’s always room for Jell-O”?) Consumers may well prefer brand placements over watching endless blocks of commercials, but they’ll rebel if the insertions become too distracting. Smart advertisers don’t want to drive their audience to the next channel.
But even if product placement were a crisis demanding government intervention, Adelstein’s proposal to require lengthy, prominent disclosures would be a peculiar solution. Audiences will ignore the disclosures the same way they’re increasingly ignoring (or TiVo-ing past) commercials—the same behavior pattern that’s driving the move toward product placement in the first place. If only there were a way the FCC could place its message somewhere in the show itself…
Hood has this exactly right: TiVo and digital recorders with skip capabilities have created a problem for advertisers that they have done an admirable job of overcoming by turning more and more to product placement—only doing so, oftentimes, from a meta-perspective that takes into account that the public recognizes the necessity of product placement as a way to circumvent TiVo-ing.
It’s a cat and mouse game. But when advertisers are creative about the approach, viewers don’t seem to mind—nor, pace the fears of the FCC, are they so pliable that the mere inclusion of a specific product in a dramatic product (rather than it’s generic equivalent—for instance, say, and Apple computer flatscreen vs. a computer screen with no identifying logo) turns them into consumers who are being unfairly coerced. Additionally, the inclusion of specific products in a dramatic work, when done subtly, has the potential to add a level or reality to the proceedings; similarly, when done obviously, it has the effect of adding a layer of self-consciousness and self-referentiality which is the cornerstone of much postmodern art.
What is certain is that a few benevolent kings running the FCC should not have the power to decide how a consumer is advertised to when the method the market seems to prefer has shown no documentable effects of harm.
Or let them. And the public, as Hood points out, will simply ignore these new disclosures—which in the end will serve only to waste time, network money, and reduce the time available to advertisers in the first place.
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update: I meant to bring this up in the body of the post, but the marketplace will determine the viability of a particular placement strategy. For instance, has anyone else noticed that a Chrysler 3000 is receiving top billing over Harrison Ford in the televised previews for his new movie, Firewall? I’m not sure yet whether I find this amusing or crassly consumeristic; and I’m not sure yet whether how I ultimately come down on that question will have any impact on my desire to see the movie. But Chrysler’s approach is bold, to say the least. I don’t even remember a Bond film so baldly advertising one of it’s cars. The closest I can come to an analagous recent film was the remake of The Italian Job, which reintroduced the Cooper Minis to US markets.
L.E. Modesitt Jr. has a good SF book on the subject called “Flash” where the protagonists’ specialty is product placement advertising in entertainment because separate commercials have completely disappeared due to filtering by viewers.
Whatever… remember all the generic stuff in “Repo Man”? Cans of “Food” and “Drink” and such? It was funny because people actually do use products with brand names. Why shouldn’t the brands pay for the privledge of being what the characters use?
I’m watching a Pistons game right now. Richard Hamilton has his cornrows styled after the tread pattern of…some tires. I don’t know which tires, but he still gets paid. So everyone (I give a crap about) wins.
An FCC-mandated SOME PLAYERS’ HEADS BROUGHT TO YOU BY BLIZZAK would queer the whole deal. And the company would love it.
Hm. Corporate subsidies masquerading as consumer protection. How unusual. <â€â€SARCASM BROUGHT TO YOU BY AUSTRIAN SCHOOL ECONOMICS.
Watch an old Burns and Allen show or other of it’s ilk, and you will see true heavy handed. But often too, you will se the actors actually laughing at the absurdity like Wayne and Garth did in Wayne’s World.
The overly obvious plaement is distracting. And some directors who you think would no better just seem ham fisted with this art. Even Spielberg. Or maybe its the producer yelling about getting the Pepsi can in focus and faced correctly in the middle of te chase scene.
TW: The taco bell chalupa goes above the covers sunshine.
I’m sorry for that most pathetic typing. I resolve to preview all future post from now on.
sorry
This message brought to you by Duff. DRINK DUFF! And you’ll pretty much do all of them.
It appears that the FCC is looking for new work. This means that the agency is either overstaffed or underemployed.
I’ll bet on overstaffed.
Waitaminnit! Product placement in an advertisement?
Waitaminnit (the sequel)! Jeff, are you compensated for your placement of the above named automobile—or the movie, for that matter—in a post?
If not, mebbe you oughta look into it.
Uh, the point was that the car was receiving top billing over the actor, not that the product placement in an advertisement is somehow unseemly.
I just found it interesting. If you don’t, that’s cool. Go play Tetris or something.
I commented because I also found it interesting. Please forgive my lack of clarity.
Because of the CAPITALISM!!!!!
I like product placement, no one hangs around drinking out of white cans with 2” high letters spelling BEER or eating out of a plain blue bag labeled only potato chips. Having real products makes the film more accurate.
I think it was one of the CSIs where they had a candy wrapper in the lawn that said “Almond Fun” or some such variation, I immediately figured that Peter Paul wouldn’t pay up
At this point, I think a Chrysler 3000 may actually be able to out-act Harrison Ford. That top billing is well deserved.
Mark- you and me both. A big ol’ fake product diverts my attention from the story.
Watch “30 Minute Meals” on FoodTV—all the cans and bottles have goofy generic labels somebody in their art department spat out. It’s actually a bit annoying, particularly when the bottles are identifiable.
Contrast that with “Good Eats”—which is frequently shot in identified supermarkets, though brand names on containers are often obscured. Or “Monster House”, which, for a while at least, featured a no-shit, for-real, Mr. Clean helping with the clean-up after all the work was done.
Um, no, I guess I don’t have a contribution to make. Just a couple of observations. I do wonder how much FN paid for the product placement on Stargate SG-1, though.
Wow Robert, there’s three shows I had no idea existed!
– I can deal with the random Cheetos bag on Homers tea table… Me, I’m trying to adjust to the deliberate volume boost at ad time followed by a volume drop when the show comes on… Really really annoying….
There’s a problem using most old time radio shows as examples of some sort of subversive product placement. The Jack Benny Program cited above was in fact not the Jack Benny Program; but was the Jell-o Program, starring Jack Benny. There was one sponser, and everyone knew who it was (later, it was the Lucky Strike Program). Commercials for the products were built into, and part of the program (in most cases, there were no commercial breaks as it were). It was very transparent to the audience. The commercials were often quite clever and were fondly remembered as being intrical parts of the programs. It’s a model I wish TV would return to; however, the cost for an individual sponser would be quite prohibitive.
When it really gets bad is in 2030 or so, when “modding” old-style commercials via home-brewed computer graphics manipulation software becomes an Olympic sport. Along with Lunar Cave Flying.
Oops. I shouldn’t have said that.
Having made the mistake of going to see “Firewall,” I’ve found that there is indeed a good reason for the Chrysler 3000 getting top billing: the car is featured more than many characters in the first half of the film. It was indeed like a frickin’ automobile commercial. The other striking thing about it was the fact that everyone in the movie used PC’s with Windows, which you rarely see in films or television.
I’m reminded of the first Austin Powers movie, wherein the product placements were done in deliberately, painfully obvious ways (e.g. the Space Needle in Seattle being covered in a Starbucks logo, followed by “Number Two” discussing at length his delicious latte). It was clever and funny, and also a clear reflection that the audience is aware of product placement in movies, and neither “taken in” nor offended nor harmed by the practice.
I do wonder how much FN paid for the product placement on Stargate SG-1, though.
(If only the SG teams would go to the F2000…)
More firearm product placement, please.
Heat was good for that, and delightfully subtle.
I think my favorite mocking of product placement has to be Josie and the Pussycats. Probably the only time I’ve laughed at product placement.
My wife watches Monk and they have the most painfully forced used of product placement I’ve seen.
I’ve seen some really crass product placements and they didn’t make me want to go buy the product. They just annoyed me. My guess is that the most effective placements are the ones you don’t even notice, where the product is used and shown in a natural, unforced way.
As Jeff argued, this “problem” is probably of the self-correcting variety.
What would we, the stupid public, do without dedicated public servants like Mr. Adelstein to look out for us?! The horror! We might see commercials without realizing what they are! How will the Republic survive?!
If this guy has nothing more useful to do with his time, perhaps he could come over and change my oil or something.
There were tons of ads for the BMW Z3 in the run up to Golden Eye. They were similar to the ads for the Chrysler 300, some had footage from the film.
I was going to mention the Z3 but ech beat me to it. I remember that campaign very well. At the time it was a very exciting design and its introduction a bold market move for BMW. In the film it was more of a “work” car for Bond; he also had an Aston Martin in London that seemed to be his personal car (naturally).
Oh, I remember that, and was going to mention it too—but those were car ads. This, however, is a bit different inasmuch as the trailer for the film gives the car first billing (off the top of my head, something to the effect of “Cine see the new Chrysler 3000 and Harrison Ford in Firewall) or some such.
Nothing wrong with it per se; just ineffective as an advertising technique because it made me recoil.
People used to, years ago when “generic brands” were the going thing in most supermarkets. Generic beer started out in a yellow can with just the word “BEER” prominently displayed—along with all the other products in that section of the store. Later they went to white with black type-writer-style lettering.
Then the fad passed, and now we drink our generic beer out of cans colorfully labelled “Budweiser.”