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Would Fonzie Sell You A Lexus?
Faux_Pseudo writes: "In an attempt to flood your field of vison with more advertising the NY Times (free reg)has an article on how "digital technology may be used for the first time to place "virtual" products in scenes of a syndicated television series." If you were taken aback by The Duke selling Coors beer you might want to unplug the TV now." This sort of digital manipulation isn't totally new, but it seems like what we've seen so far is just the tip of the reality-distortion iceberg. As xueexueg puts it, "With any luck we'll see Capt. Janeway ask the food replicator for a meal, and a personal pan pizza will materialize."
And I'm not going to stand for it. I'm going to write my congressman a letter. But I'll be taking an Amtrak train tonight to help a friend do some work on his house. I'll have to write the letter on my Palm Vx; it's portability and functionality are incredible. Of course, on the train I'll have plenty of tunes thanks to my Panasonic portable CD player with 40-second anti-skip technology! And I won't go hungry thanks to Snickers. Packed with peanuts, Snickers really satisfies.
Once I get there, the chores will be quick work, thanks to my new Black and Decker cordless screwdriver, the PowerDriver(tm). It's powered by the VersaPak(tm) system, so if it runs out of juice I can just pop in the spare battery pack.
Is this post your nightmare yet? I can keep going if you like!
That would explain the cancellation of The Lone Gunmen. After all they used LINUX (or at least Langley and Byers did. . . ). M$ obviously paid Fox to take 'em off the air. . .
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I was watching Happy Gilmore the other day on network television and I noticed that a lot of the product placement ads were digitial REMOVED. For those of you who haven't seen this movie, it is very funny but the product placement goes WAY overboard. For instance TWO scenes take place at a Subway(TM) restaurant and Happy wears a Subway shirt for the last 40 mins of the movie. The weird thing was that the Subway logo was digitially greyed out (correct spelling - I am Canadian :) ) most of the time as were other ads. Technology is a double edged sword ;), we just have to make sure that consumers don't get screwed out of their side of the sword by legislation.
-Shieldwolf
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
Are you referring to Vivien Leigh?
It's been going on for a long time over here in America, too. Off the top of my head, there's been ads using digitally altered footage of Fred Astaire, John Wayne, Martin Luther King and Lou Gehrig (although the last two were tasteful, I thought), not to mention the movie Ben Hur (or whatever that famous chariot race scene was from).
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Well, I certainly see your point, however, there are two different types of uses here. First we have Fred Astaire dancing with the product being sold and we have the Duke pouring Coors Light beer (or whatever it was), and then we have a commercial which uses images of the two famous speeches, but doesn't manipulate the image to place their product in with the person in question. I would have to agree that it might be seen as trivializing Dr. King's speech, which is wrong, but at least he wasn't up there with a bottle of liquor saying "I have Jim Beam" or "I brush with Gleem" or "I play with Bleem" or something equally stupid.
Anyhow, as far as tasteless goes, nothing beats the typical network TV sitcom. Tasteless and unfunny. (Tasteless and funny would be OK... but that's a different discussion). The only thing worse is the sleazy tabloid trash passing as network news "magazines" like Doltline.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I'm not a free-marketer in general, but it's certainly not a right to have advertisment free entertainment. If the placed ads begin to detract from the enjoyment of the show, then it will start to lose viewers. Obviously, there's a sweet spot somewhere that maximizes revenue.
Is there any reason why the people who own the rights to the shows shouldn't be allowed to attempt to maximize their revenue? I don't see how society would suffer as a whole if the practice became widespread. Obviously the viewers lose, but that's the perogative of a seller who has what a buyer wants: in this case, entertainment.
Of course, when advertising and (theoretically) objective news mix, that's a whole different matter.
The question is, how obtrusive will it be? Will it be ads on billboards in the background, or on the sides of buses as they go by. Or will it be logos on the characters t-shirts?
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Its fun to watch for subtle product placements:
"Goldeneye"
1. James Bond opens up an IBM thinkpad
2. (hard to see). Near the end of the movie when the base blows up, you'll see a CRT with an OS/2 bootup screen.(I think it's a bootup screen).
But what's not to say that a movie named "Corvette Summer" isn't some commercial by Chevrolet?
Television is a waste of time- it requires no thought, no action, and fails on nearly every count to be mentally stimulating (excepting PBS and the BBC, but including BBCAmerica)- and to top it off, it tries to cram the thing I hate the most down my throat- ads.
The ads got to me, to the point of violence. It was interesting, when I was a kid, to tape an episode of Star Trek DS9 and come to the cold realization that out of that 60 minutes of time, less than 45 minutes of it was the program. Deduct credits and intro, and you're down to 42, if that. And probably less these days. That boiled down to three minutes of clutter and fifteen minutes of ads for beer, preparation H, and cadillacs.
I realized I was getting more out of books, computers, and talking to people that I ever managed to squeeze out of the accursed idiot box. The constant volume shifts between the incessant ads and the blase content were giving me headaches, and the pervasiveness of the marginally talented local news personalities with their overblown egos really started to get to me after I realized that nothing I'd seen on the news bore a direct affect on my day-to-day life. I haven't watched television in over a year- I've made a few exceptions for movies, mostly older films, but in general I've turned off, tuned out, peeled my ass off of the damned couch and done something with my life.
Turning on a television is a waste of energy. Watching the damned thing is a waste of your life- what's going to make for better memories- a brain full of Voyager and Buffy episodes or a brain full of conversation, creative work, and real experience that the television is never going to come close to giving you?
Kill the damned thing- it's completely opt-in, so you have no right to bitch about the fucking ads when you can turn it off and do something meaningful.
as it stands, advertising already has a much more insidious impact on the determination of the content of the shows that we watch than adding a few coke cans represents. putting a pizza hut box in friends is a clear endorsement of pizza hut -- is this honestly worse for its digital fabrication than, say, behind the scenes deals to decide what they should wear on the basis of the gap's agenda, or giving plot vetos to large conservative corporations like P&G?
if you aren't going into this with your eyes open, you're setting yourself up. if you aren't watching with the understanding that TV's job is to deliver audiences to advertisers, you'll miss the point every time.
now, what if dan rather starts putting up fake billboards in 'documentary' footage? that's the real question, and i know it's been done, but what about, for example, changing all signs to read in english when reporting from other countries? where's the slippery slope here? i'm not really sure.
this is pretty effed up, tho, i'll say that much. makes my head spin a little.
god is just pretend.
I'm just waiting for the day that Bo and Luke get lost and fire up the General Lee's OnStar system.
Guy's crusing along in his generic car at 80-85 mph, when suddenly a Lexus pulls on the onramp at 45 mph and cuts across 5 lanes of traffic, cutting him off. He slams on his brakes and tailgates the Lexus and tailgates the car down to the next exit where it gets off. At the bottom of the exit ramp the light's red so the Lexus stops. He gets out of his car and walks up to the Lexus. He knocks on the window and it rolls down. Inside is a tiny old woman who can't see over the steering wheel. He says "Excuse me, you cut me off back there..." She looks at him, gives him the finger, and says "Fuck you! I drive a Lexus!" and then floors it. Fade to black, voice over, "Fuck you. I drive a Lexus."
I want to pitch this to Lexus. Think they'll go for it?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Make your own doctor/latex glove joke...
I don't see a problem with this. I'll just buy the advertised products, and pay for them with superimposed images of dollar bills.
What's the big deal?
"With any luck we'll see Capt. Janeway ask the food replicator for a meal, and a personal pan pizza will materialize."
With any luck we'll see Capt. Janeway ask the food replicator for a meal, and Seven of Nine's cat suit will digitally drop off!
That would be some freakin product placement!
But under the DMCA, use of the food replicator would violate Pizza Hut's intellectual property rights to the recipe of Personal Pan Pizza.
Or maybe not, if it's used for liscensed, official marketing purposes.
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