New York Diary

Television Product-ions

The most recent Economist has an interesting article highlighting the return of product placement in movies and on TV. Why? Because with TiVo and webcasts, viewers are increasingly more likely to fast-forward past the ads. It's no use having a great advertisement if nobody watches it.

Much of the Economist's focus is on proposed legislation in EU countries in order to allow more product placement. As it is, many of these countries have heretofore subscribed to the premise that it's one thing to be explicitly sold a product, and another to be implicitly or subliminally sold a product while you think what you are doing is watching a TV show. The move to change this attitude is afoot primarily because European broadcasters are losing the advertising revenue that largely keeps them afloat (and, we presume, this trend will only be magnified as the technology improves and becomes even more popularly accessible). The Economist points out, rightly, that most European viewers watch American shows anyway (where such product placement is ubiquitous), so they're already getting the more subtle advertising that Europe fears. Moreover, says the Economist, viewing a TV show in which the main characters drink Name Brand Here Whiskey and eat Another Great Brand Potatoes is not that different from zipping by (and barely registering) a billboard or scrolling through an internet ad at the top of a web page you want to read.

All of these points may be true, and the arguments are not trivial. Still, I am left wondering if they actually make the case for increased and very subtle advertising. The Economist seems to dismiss getting "taken in" by these methods as a thing that only happens to the stupidest of people, or which is otherwise completely unimportant: "As they see the hero ply the compliant heroine with some seductive libation," the Economist writes, "sillier viewers may really believe that's the way to get sultry blondes into the sack.... As for people who believe the literal truth of what they see in soap operas--well, no amount of regulation can protect them from themselves." This last sentence is obviously true, but also a throw-away. After all, we are not concerned with people who believe the literal truth of what they see, but rather with the much more subtle intricacies of advertising.

We shouldn't so easily dismiss this stuff. I mean, advertising works. That's why we do it. And while I have nothing strongly against advertising as a means of selling one's product, I do think it's worth considering whether we want to encourage continually blurring the lines between straightforward, no-strings-attached endorsement and paid advertising. After all, it is a very different thing to use, publicize, endorse, or tout a product for the simple reason that you like it and think it is a good product than to do the same when you have no particular affinity for the product, but rather because you're being paid. Allowing media outlets to do product placement may be economically sound (especially in a global world where networks have to compete against American companies that already reap those profits), but it also undermines the honest endorsement. If a TV show's characters wear certain clothes without receiving kickbacks, that tells us something real about the quality, cache, cost, or value of those clothes (even if that something is just "this is normal and unremarkable"). This isn't so when shows start to receive payments for their products (even if, in any particular case, the "endorsement" was unsolicited and unpaid).

Anyway, it seems like feeding a consumer culture is not always obviously good (though it may indeed be in the nature of television itself).

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UPDATE 11/11: This post has spurned further thoughts which you can read at www.blackcrag.blogspot.com and
www.mayornot.com.

posted by Skay @ 11:28 AM