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Group Asks Gov't to Crack Down on Product Placement
Buck Mulligan writes "The rise of commercial-skipping Tivo has resulted in greater reliance on "product placement," and Commercial Alert has filed a petition (pdf) with the Federal Trade Commission urging the agency to crack down on the practice. Gary Ruskin of Commercial Alert writes: "The interweaving of advertising and programming has become so routine that television networks now are selling to advertisers a measure of control over aspects of their programming. Some programs are so packed with product placements that they are approaching the appearance of infomercials. The head of a company that obtained repeated product placements actually called one such program 'a great infomercial.' Yet these programs typically lack the disclosure required of infomercials to uphold honesty and fair dealing.""
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
"If you don't then purchase your TV channels. "
We do purchse our TV channels. The cable company pays X cents per channel per Y # of customers for each channel they offer. Each channel sets their price. My hubby works for the local cable company and told me the reason cable prices had gone up was because they had been paying 10 cents per channel for Y number of customers and the price had gone up to 30 cents. The stations can pretty much raise the price all they want and people don't complain to them because they don't know how it works. They just complain to the cable company about their prices going up instead.
It was Kathy Griffin, and she said she got paid to go tour around all the talk shows with her only goal being to advertise the product. She would slip in it in story, and often had to tell the show beforehand that she was there to promote the product.