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TiVo Causes Increase in Product Placement
ndansmith writes "Wired has got an article on how TiVo and other 'ad-skipping technologies' have caused an upsurge in product placements on network television shows. The 84% increase in product placements on TV over the last year has drawn protests from both the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild. An example from the article: 'In a recent episode of the NBC series Medium, writers had to work the movie Memoirs of a Geisha into the dialogue three times because of a deal the network made with Sony earlier in the season. They even had the characters go on a date to an early screening of the movie and bump into friends who had just viewed Geisha to tell them how good it was.' Readers may also remember a controversial Cisco Systems product placement on Fox's 24."
While there are obvious disadvantages to this (such as crappier, cheesier scripts), couldn't this be a good thing? I mean, wouldn't you guys like it if commercials were cut down signifigantly? I know that I would.
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I suppose it was inevitable really... they'll always find a way to get to us. Here's hoping we never get quite as bad as depicted in "The Truman Show" though. I almost crapped my pants when I watched "I, Robot" and "The Island" and saw all the stuff they were pushing along with the film.
Consciousness is a myth. Trust me.
Those familiar with my anti-copyright ideas know that I've promoted product placement as a partial solution to PVR commercial skipping.
The advertising community is, yet again, far behind. Tivo is so 2001. BitTorrent and the newer anonymous P2P apps take the problem a step farther.
With vidgeeks easily editing out commercials for P2P redistribution (this can be time consuming to be frame perfect), it is only a matter of time before they digitally smear out product placement. A little bit of work and you can nuke logos without the MTV blur.
What will advertisers do next?
My thought is that we'll see video and audio starting and stopping at different offsets. Imagine -- a scene ends with the audio ending but the video continuing. A character can walk off screen for entire seconds after they're finished talking. If Cisco paid to have the audio portion of the ad start before the video is over. P2P editors could nuke this audio.
The video could end before the audio, maybe bringing a logo in before a narration is finished. Still, the video portion could be edited to black.
Pop-up video advertising could be placed like A&E and Bravo do with TB show mentions. In fact, I believe we see more of these mentions to prep us for 3rd party pop-overs. Yet a vidgeek could humorously edit the pop-over to advertise their l33t skills.
So what is the answer?
DRM.
It's nice to see the revenue battle not taking the form of buying congressmen for once. It's a battle between those who don't view commercials (which means less money for advertising slots), and the need for the television company to make money. The latest move is to include product-placement. If it works, great. If it doesn't, then those tv shows will be doomed (or they'll stop doing it). It is an interesting battle, as it shows the problem of having entertainment for free. I think the internet sidesteps this issue as the cost is much lower, so more people creating the content are willing to be out of pocket. Unfortunately with tv, this just isn't an option because of the large budgets.
It could mean the death of tv as we know it. Although I believe that if it does mean the death of tv, tv shows will continue to live in DVD releases (as the audience directly pays for the product and has been successful).
Something about this still made me feel uneasy. Now I think I know what it is--the problem is that you don't realize you're being advertised-to. In magazines, ads which might be mistaken for articles are supposed to be clearly marked, usually by writing "Advertisement" across the top. Infomercials usually begin with "The following is a paid program." But infomercials are sneaky, sort of like subliminal advertising was supposed to be.
I don't specifically object to paid placement, but I'd like for it to be clear when paid placement is taking place. No idea how to do that without distracting from the show, though.
make advertisements worth watching.
/advertising degree?
I agree. Have you seen the trash graduating with a marketing
So make a commercial that's funny, witty, beautiful.
More boobs, less FCC?
I bet there are a thousand independent filmmakers out there who could come up with 30 second clips that fit this bill on half the budget they usually spend.
I agree. If Coke had a "Make us a free ad and we'll pay to run the top 10" you'd have 5000 filmmakers dying for the publicity.
That is the problem. You have 864 ads per channel-day. You have no idea what channels a viewer actually watch. There's no way to reduce dupes.
Here's a thought: Use Tivo. Run commercials, offer a prize to the first 100 people who click Thumbs Up when a red dot appears for 5 frames. Who knows which commercial per show gets the dot? You'll increase the number of commercial-viewers during the broadcast, maybe overcoming the loss to Tivo?
...did a couple going to an advanced screening of the film manage to bump into their friends who had already seen it?
this is my third time reading about it, and i just noticed that.
As much as everyone likes to bash the writers, it doesn't strike me as that outrageous.
When the network starts collecting money so that the people who write the scripts will say certain things, the writers have to work harder to do their episodes and still meet the networks obligations.
And if the writing is sucky because they were busy working in product placement, they're the ones who get fired; not the guy who got the comission for landing the deal.
I must be soul-sucking enough to write the dreck that is on TV, knowing your bosses are making more money so you can be forced to write even more dreck with product-placement would be too much.
They're effectively now writing ad-copy as well as scripts.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I didn't mind Cisco's ads on last season's 24. I would rather see the characters using real products like Cisco's IP Phones than some propmaster's incorrect vision of what an IP phone should look like. Ford also sponsors the show and they drive big Ford trucks. Toyota sponsored the DVD preview of Season 5 and you see Jack driving a Toyota. Last season on Smallville, Clark used the red Old Spice deodorant - it was in his locker and on the big banner over the football field.
Product placement is only bad when it's inappropriate and doesn't flow with the show. I sure wouldn't want to see Jack Bauer and Chloe O'Brien discussing Kotex Tampons or Vagisil cream as he's about to waste some terrorists. Or President Palmer plugging Uncle Ben's rice at a press conference. But if they are looking for a USB flash card containing Top Secret information, I don't mind them mentioning SanDisk.
No, because there is no "done right": the point is invasive deception. Best case, I don't notice, and so the placement was worthless (or perhaps they hope for some "subliminal" effect). If I notice, it's just tacky, and I'm going to think the same of the product and the company in question. This goes for anything, including the latest BMW in a James Bond flick (which is pretty much one big running advertisement these days anyway).
I'm saying be artistic, and honest. The latter is a word that probably doesn't exist on the planet marketers come from. Then again, the former is probably some hideous disease there, too. But these are things that here on Earth, most people appreciate.
One final thing that always helps: have a product that doesn't suck. It's always nice. I understand the need to get the word about The Latest Thing you've come up with. That's cool. As long as it's not just rebranded sugar water with a shinier logo, to somehow grab people's attention. Spend some of that advertising budget on actually making something worthwhile. (Of course, the problem is it doesn't matter; that shiny new logo slapped on Crapola Cola Extreme results in far more sales than anything else. Such is the state of modern consumer culture, but I can change that on my end by refusing to buy the stuff.)
At least, however, if you're going to make an ad, don't make me hate you when I'm done watching it. For the third time. In ten minutes. Or I'll start an arms race to avoid it, and I will ultimately win.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
A few years ago, I decided to specifically watch for product placement, so I tend to notice it enough to make note of it. In general, I keep an eye out for shots that contain an identifying product logo when the logo adds nothing to the story. Some placement, like the Mc Donalds placement in The Fifth Element, are blatant and hard to miss. In I Robot, Wil Smith's "retro" possesions (shoes, music player), arent so subtle. The intrusive ads in Minority Report are odd, they are blatant, but the mechanism for the advertisement is relevant to the plot. Others are easier to miss; Jackie Chan movies seem to feature a Pepsi logo of some sort more often then not.
Even good product placement is not too hard to spot if you look for it. In general, if manage to notice that one person has, for example, a Nokia phone, then its a safe bet that every other phone will be the same brand. The car driven by the principle character is a favorite target for product placement. Soft drinks are most often one or the other.
24 Usually handles product placement pretty decently, but I concede that they do a suprising amount of it. The placement for Cisco was perhaps the most blatant, but not quite jarring enough for me to make too much of it. 24 Product placement tends to encompass the following products (that I have noticed),
Computers: Alot of CTU equipment is Dell. Season 4 had a few Alienware laptops as well.
Cell Phones: I think Jack uses a Nokia phone.
Cars: A great deal of Ford SUV's. It appears that Season 5 may use Toyota placements, based on the teaser from the Season 4 box set.
I consider bad product placement to be any sort of product placement where the product in question becomes the focus of the camera instead of the story at hand. 24 Usually does ok, the Cisco placement aside. They do alot of it, but its done as tastefully enough that it does not annoy me.
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FX is the worst offender. I was watching Disclosure once, bad enough, and the fucking Nip/Tuck ad at the bottom of the screen was metal on metal.
I agree whole heartedly, all it takes to get people to watch commercials is clever/entertaining commercials. I for one will always stop and watch a Jack in the Box commercial, even as I skip over the others. Why? 'Cause they're funny as hell (usually)...
When I lived in the USA (British native for reference), I found your TV unbearable. Adverts popped up at random timings and without any kind of warning. Here in the UK, you can actually plan aroud the commercial breaks - it's a half-hour program, you get a few minutes after quarter of an hour. Just right to nip to the loo or make some tea.
I'm hoping that it doesn't spread like trailers on DVDs is starting to. I bought a DVD recently and up came trailers for other DVDs the company marketing people thought I might like. Will definitely be keeping an eye out for which company releases the next film I might be tempted to buy. Same applies to the two-minute piracy warning - I paid for the DVD. I am NOT their target audience.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Why the Hell would somebody in the future be so desperate to get hold of some boring old trainers from some random year in the past? This happened at the very start and was outstandingly obvious. Pretty much destroyed any benefit of the doubt I'd managed to cling onto before seeing the film.
Don't forget the Audi product placement too. I hope the director got a nice cut of the bribe for that to compensate him for his loss of self-respect. The film might as well have been a very long advert. This is the director who did Dark City, too. Shame on you Alex Proyas! SHAME ON YOU! What excuse do you have for this?
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
like in Germany. Does this mean they will not be able to export those shows and thus losing a lot of revenue or will they just try it anyway, get caught and banned? Or will these countries get edited versions, 70% shorter... ;-)
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Viral Videos & Ads site has one (Metamorphosis) of the AXE commercials. Are there any more out there?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
If i had ever bought a DVD with a 2 minute forced viewing ad or warning, i'd take the dvd back complaining that it didnt work in my dvd player, and get another movie for the same price, then off i go to the pirate bay to pick up the movie WITHOUTH the ad.
Yeah, I know exactly what you mean.
Last season I started to watch the Shield on FX, after having watched the previous season on my computer by bittorrenting the episodes a day or two after they were released, and I found that the downloaded episodes made for a 1000% better TV-watching experience. No sliders, no moving graphics in the bottom of the screen, no station ID logos, and higher quality than my analog TV.
Someone should clue the local TV stations into a phrase: "value added." They have none. Right now they exist only because they have a monopoly on content (at least at the level of effort that most non-technical users are willing to expend). But as that monopoly breaks down and viewers start to get flooded with content from other places, they're going to be in real trouble.
I still watch a few TV shows, mostly as a social thing with friends, but if it weren't for the fact that we just enjoy getting together once a week and ordering pizza, I'd probably just cancel everything but my basic cable subscription and watch tv shows when they hit NetFlix.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I agree, and it's absolute worst when those sliders happen during a fast paced game like basketball. Or the last two minutes of a football game and the score is tied and we have to listen to who's f-ing who on an "All New Desperate Houswives."
It makes me sick. At least take a tip from Google and target your adds
I predict that within the next year we'll see stations running a constant advertising crawler. They'l probably shrink the size of the actual content area and fill the margins with advertising, much like CNN does with its stock ticker, weather, etc. Ha! Try to skip that! I further predict that within another year this practice will be commonplace and used on the majority of channels.
In fact, this may drive wide-screen format for shooting new shows. The shows will be shot in 16:9 and broadcast full-screen, with the ads taking up the remaining space. And no, those of you with wide-format TVs won't be able to just crop out the ads. Some shows will be broadcast with the content at the top of the screen and ads at the bottom. Some will have the content at the bottom and ads at the top. Some will have content in the middle and ads both top and bottom. And some will even flip the ad and content panes mid-show. If you want to see the shows ad-free you'll have to buy the DVDs. (Or, of course, download pirated copies that have already been cropped.)
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
To be sure.
I'm curious, though, (I, too, buy almost-too-exhorbitantly-priced, legal DVDs) whether the cheap pirated DVDs also come with the imposing FBI/Interpol Warning message on them, too? You know, for authenticity's sake:)? I'm sure the producers ands buyers get a smile out of them, too.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Actually, I'd argue that iRobot had commercials in it. I noticed that ALL of the product placement happens within specific blocks, right next to each other. Every now and then they take a break from the action to tell you all about cars, shoes and package delivery. Then no mention until 30 minutes later, at which all three products are seen again.