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."

Comments

Good or Bad?

[Donniedarkness]

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.

Re:Good or Bad?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Something I forgot to mention, was that PVRs really aren't broadly accepted, so TiVo seems to be a bit of a red herring. I don't see a 10% installed base of PVRs (if it is that, I think last I heard, it was 6-8%) as sufficient justification of inserting ads as part of the shows themselves.

I will say I'm setting up a Myth system in part because of the ads, there are way too many and way too lame. Using tapes is getting annoying.

Re:Good or Bad?

[shmlco]

Not to mention that placements bias networks toward shows on which placements are possible. Be kind of hard, for example, to to place a Pepsi or Apple product on a show like Firefly. (Though it might be worthwhile starting a Blue Sun corporation. Hmmm.....)

Re:Good or Bad?

[Eivind]

Quite a lot even. It's sort of a running joke in Norway that "60 minutes" is allocated a 50-minute program slot by us, because it's an /american/ hour -- which apparently consists of 10 minutes more comercials than we get. (the 50 minutes by us also includes comercials, I'm guessing the actual program itself is maybe 40 minutes)

Re:Good or Bad?

[Chelloveck]

I thought the product placement in Minority Report was extremely well done. It was kind of in-your-face, but it needed to be. It actually advanced the plot. I think avoiding product placement and using obviously fake brands would have detracted from the movie. "John Anderton, you look like you could use a Duff Lite!" doesn't have the same feel to it.

You couldn't get away with this in many movies, but once in a while it works.

Inevitable

[Twisted64]

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.

Solutions

[dada21]

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.

Doesn't really matter

[aussie_a]

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).

how, exactly,...

[drewxhawaii]

...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.

Re:Artistic integrity?

[gstoddart]

So, in other words, it isn't like they are concerned about becoming shills...only that they aren't paid enough to be whores.

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.

Cisco's products on "24" were part of the story

[SpecialAgentXXX]

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.

Re:Quite frankly,

[h4rm0ny]

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.

Re:Quite frankly,

[TerminalInsanity]

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.

Where's the value added?

[Kadin2048]

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.

Re:Quite frankly,

[smokeslikeapoet]

Best of all, there are few if any commercials, and NO ANNOYING LOGOS OR SLIDERS. That's gets my vote hands down.

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

Re:Quite frankly,

[Chelloveck]

Now it's having to endure visual clutter like the station ID logo, and these rediculous sliders that zip in and out at the bottom of the screen just after we've already been subject to four or more commercials.

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.)