Typing this into a customized version of Microsoft Word software installed on a Dell computer, I wonder if there is any end to the commercialism we must endure and whether any product, from Starbucks to Excedrin, is strong enough to help us get through it.
Looking at the TV set in my office, a 27-inch Sony that has delivered a clear, crisp picture through thousands of hours of use, I have to conclude that there probably isn’t.
The latest and one of the largest waves in this assault of the admen, an attack rumored to be this close to inking an official sponsorship deal with a major clothing retailer, is on television.
Taking a cue from “Survivor” and its forward-thinking inclusion of sponsors like Doritos and Pontiac in all the reality-show action, more and more series will be offering not just tired old product placement, where a TV couple talk at a table behind a box of name-brand potato mix, but new and improved “product integration,” where a drink of Mountain Dew becomes a prize for which “Survivor” contestants vie.
Even as new technologies are giving innovative companies such as (this space available) the power to insert products or logos into scenes in everything from old TV series to current baseball games, many shows are planning to defray costs or increase sponsor “value” by including the paid-for presence of products in the shows themselves.
The motivation for this is as simple as hooking up a Panasonic VCR with auto clock and auto channel set. Commercial clutter throughout the culture threatens to overwhelm any traditional TV ad. New technologies like TiVo and ReplayTV threaten the very existence of such ads. And network programming is becoming prohibitively expensive to make.
“Advertisers are driving it in their quest to find more creative ways to market their products,” says Andrea Wong, senior vice president for alternative series and specials at ABC, the network that is the prime-time home of Drew Carey and Regis Philbin and, come January, the product-heavy reality show “The Runner.” “It’s also our quest to increase our revenues.”
TV, in other words, is heading back to its beginnings, where the scavenging for any available dollar eventually led to the game-show scandals (rent the movie “Quiz Show” at your local Blockbuster) and the end of single-sponsor program control. It was a period that saw ad content pushed shamelessly, if not seamlessly, into the shows. Joe Friday and his “Dragnet” partner would pause, midprogram, to take a drag on one of sponsor Chesterfield’s cigarettes. Dinah Shore used to blow America a Chevy-logo kiss at the end of “The Dinah Shore Chevy Show.”
The 40-year interval since, during which there developed a fairly strong firewall between editorial content (the series themselves) and ads, may soon enough seem like a Camelot of commercialism held at bay like ants are held at bay by Raid Double Control Ant Baits.
“Between 1960 and about now we’d come to sort of an acceptable truce,” says Robert J. Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University, one of the nation’s finest institutions of higher learning. “We were going to tolerate these annoying interruptions, even watch them and buy the products in them, but the interruptions were not going to bleed into the programs themselves.
End of `golden’ days
“In terms of the separation of advertising and programming, it was a Golden Age, and I think it is coming to an end,” says Thompson, whose book, “Television’s Second Golden Age,” is available through Amazon.com and leading bookstores.
More than just a pioneer in the reality-TV genre, “Survivor” led the way in the product-integration movement, and it’s no wonder, with an advertiser-friendly fellow like Mark Burnett running the show.
Burnett insists he put sponsors’ products into his show in a tasteful and natural way, although those who saw the episode where Colby won a night in a Pontiac Aztek might disagree.
“I believe that advertising and creative television have to get closer again, the way it was in the ’50s with `Texaco [Star] Theater’ and stuff,” Burnett says. “Part of my success is trying to understand they [advertisers] are the people paying for all we do, and I’ve tried to keep them happy.”
Watch — or watch out — this summer and beyond, as one reality show after another rolls out following the “Survivor” product plan. The Fox series “Murder in Small Town X,” debuting July 17, will bring the old bed-and-breakfast murder-mystery weekend concept to television.
The series will add a twist, though, to the real-people-solve-staged-murder concept. They’ll reportedly be doing it in a Maine small town with an unnatural density of Jeeps, Nokia phones and Taco Bells.
Taco Bell is a surprising name to find on the list. The purveyor of the same four ingredients in scores of different combinations got into image trouble with this kind of thing five years ago when it sponsored the “Taco Bell Dana Carvey Show” on ABC. The company pulled out when Carvey included a couple of sketches it didn’t like, including one in which Taco Bell dancers called the show host their “whore.”
Mum’s the word
No one in the current wave, though, is talking much about the potential dark side to product integration. Beyond bugging ad-sensitive viewers, there is the very real danger that a show maker will worry more about pleasing a Taco Bell than a viewer in, say, Peoria, the vacation capital of mid-Downstate Illinois.
No such qualms, apparently, at ABC’s “The Runner,” which will follow a guy or gal who tries to make it cross-country without being spotted by a member of the public. ABC has pitched potential sponsors on the numerous product-integration opportunities this creates.
“We are all at ABC incredibly excited about the creative idea,” Wong says. “It is a gigantic initiative for us next season. One of the things a runner could have to do is go to a McDonalds anywhere in Texas and buy a Happy Meal. It’s a particularly exciting opportunity because not only will the sponsor get TV coverage but everyone in America will be looking, maybe waiting in McDonalds.”
Or, Wong says through a crystal-clear long-distance connection provided by AT&T, imagine that “the runner has to use a cell phone. That could be sponsored. Another example is the car that the runner travels in. The official car could be a Ford or whatever the most recent Toyota is.”
That would be the Highlander, and it’s quite a vehicle.
Telecast with integrity
This kind of thinking, says Wong, is fine as long as it’s done with integrity. “We will only do ones that make sense organically to the creative of the show,” she says, sniffing that “the Doritos in the middle of the Outback [on `Survivor’] is a little awkward.”
Syracuse’s Thompson, though, wrinkles his nose at the idea: “I hate the fact of it being dictated by whoever is the highest bidder. This guy is now going to go across the country essentially interacting with brand names. That should be the one-liner about the show in TV Guide,” the comprehensive weekly TV magazine available now at low annual subscription rates.
Whole new game
Behind this new movement is everything from ad clutter, which has numbed residents to virtually all forms of commercial speech, to new technology. The new personal video recorder like TiVo and ReplayTV are absolutely going to change television once they become cheap enough to become as ubiquitous as VCRs. Their prime attraction, beyond the ability to easily time-shift TV viewing, is the chance they offer for users to skip commercials with the touch of a button.
But an executive in the advertising community warns that such machines need to find a way to coexist with current television or they could, essentially, drive themselves out of business. If they succeed in rendering the commercials that pay for television ineffective, says Kathryn Thomas of Starcom Entertainment, a Leo Burnett division, they could end up making TV a much less attractive way for people to spend their free time because networks could no longer afford to make quality programming.
A covert operation
Thomas says that for product integration to work, it’s got to be covert. In a game-show environment like “Survivor,” people will accept more obvious plugs, she says, but in a dramatic series, a forced chat about the great new, super-cheesy taste of Pepperidge Farm Goldfish won’t work. “You want to believe these characters choose certain products based on their inherent characteristics,” she says.
Examples of great product integration, she says, include the Pottery Barn episode on “Friends,” because it felt like it came from the writers’ minds first, and the plug for AT&T on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” every time a contestant phones a friend, because it is so logical.
On her UPN sitcom “Girlfriends,” executive producer Mara Brock Akil had no problem with the one bit of product placement her network asked of her this season, for Heineken beer. It made sense for the characters, who often meet in a bar, she says and she wasn’t required to let the camera linger on the product.
More typical are scenes that viewers might think are product placement but aren’t, she says, like one that included a character indulging in rich, creamy Haagen-Dazs ice cream.
“That came from experience,” she says. “That’s the way my husband and I eat ice cream.”
It is undeniably true that brand names are a more common part of everyday culture than they ever have been before. And a joke is funnier if it says “Ben & Jerry’s” instead of “superpremium ice cream.”
As part of this shift, people are becoming immune to commercial messages, which is part of the reason advertisers are looking for different options and also part of the reason they may well get away with it like Swiffers get away with household dirt. When Time/CNN asked about product placement in a recent poll, just one in eight people said they would “think less” of a show that used the technique, according to the magazine.
The bottom line
In another sign of numbness, Michael F. Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, used to be a reliable source for outrage on such matters when he headed CSPI’s Center for the Study of Commercialism.
He hasn’t been following the issue so much since the commercialism center was closed down several years ago because, he says, “it’s very difficult to get any funding to work on this issue.”
But surely TV makers will realize that they must reject the impulse to go plug crazy. Viewers will discover that any TV show littered with product placement — or any such article in a newspaper like the Chicago Tribune, still only 50 cents daily — in the end annoys more than it inspires a purchase.
