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NBC to Create Programs Centered on Sponsors
explosivejared writes "It sounds farcical when you first hear it, but NBC has teamed up with an ad agency to produce actual feature programs that are centered around promoting the products of the network's sponsors. The network has already begun production on one sci-fi program entitled 'Gemini Division,' which will act as a platform for products from Microsoft, Intel, and Cisco. The programming will be broadcast via the network's 'digital properties,' e.g. the NBC web site. I guess it was only a matter of time for something like this to come along after product placement became the norm."
So what you're saying is, it's a win-win for the TV networks....they can continue to not exert any creative effort and produce crappy shows no one likes, and make money on it like it was moderately successful.
And I don't mind product placement in shows as long as it's subtle. The giant-sized HP logos on laptops always makes me chuckle, but ruins the immersiveness of the show (seriously, they're bigger than the emblem on the 9040 monster printers we use).
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What's worse, it seems these plans will give the brands involved an unprecedented level of influence over the content. From TFA: [It will be] a unique way of giving brands a seat at the table with writers and producers in developing episodic programming that ties directly to brand needs
I'm not sure how that is so different from magazines with "product reviews" that are directly funded by the producers of the products they are "reviewing". As long as they don't marketing start producing the Evening News or writing content taught in schoolrooms, it won't be any worse than most of the mass market tripe that passes for entertainment. I find it far more disturbing when marketing is presented as a factual news program than when presented as a key part of a fictional storyline.
We are all just people.
Things almost look like they're coming full circle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Kingdom
You don't even need to go back to the 50's. And it was a GREAT show.
So if you base a show entirely around a product or set of products, wouldn't that eliminate the need for commercials? At this point I would rather watch an entire show with an integrated product then try and watch the 10 minutes of "actual TV" sqeezed between 20 minutes of nonsensical commercials.
Freedom to do this is fair enough. I've no problems with the concept. What I have problems with is the fact that there are no significant alternatives in the US. PBS is massively underfunded and relies so much on commercial sponsorship that it cannot be considered an alternative. It also doesn't produce much in the way of range in programming. As far as I know, there are no other non-corporate, non-profit TV stations of any significance. Oh, there are some small operations that do local stuff, but you can't seriously expect those to produce anything to rival the BBC's 90's production of "Pride and Prejudice" or Paramount's "Deep Space Nine". I seriously doubt any independent non-profit operator would even have the budget for something on the scale of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's "Space: 1999".
Why is it important that it be non-profit? A commercial operator could do any of the above. Yes, they could, but if it is more profitable to produce commercials in the form of programs than to produce dramas in the form of programs, you can't expect businessmen to put art before money. Art is expensive and risky. Commercials are paid for by someone else and the income is guaranteed because it's paid for by the person doing the advertising. In addition to high expenses just for operating, many have shareholders to placate. Shareholders might enjoy relaxing, watching a good TV show, but they are going to enjoy watching their stocks go up in value even more.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Of course they can, even content-less commercials are copyrighted.
However, if this model becomes popular, you can just side-step the networks and distribute direct.
A few years back there was a BMW series of movie shorts that were unabashedly product placement pieces, but they were quite enjoyable.
In fact, I just found them again
Of course, fast cars are inherently entertaining to many folks. I can hardly wait for the next episode of Kleenex Man!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Plus it was the perfect way for new talents to go public with something.
The problem is, they have to be done REALLY well. Some great examples of advertisements in programming adding to show quality rather than detracting from it can be found in 30 Rock and The Colbert Report.
Examples against it are, well, most everything else.
I've been listening to old radio shows on Sirius satellite when I take long drives, and I have come to look forward to the Johnson Wax spot on the Fibber McGee and Molly show. They usually did a pretty good of working it in more or less naturally; for instance, when getting a spare room ready for a boarder, the sponsor's guy comes for a visit and marvels at how good the floor looks because of its Johnson Wax coat. Part of the fun of it is them not pretending it's not a sponsor's spot. Usually Fibber will make some comment to the audience about cover your ears, once he gets going he doesn't know how to stop, and there's always some good natured ribbing. In fact, I end up looking forward to them. I imagine it was much the same for the listeners back in the day.
If sponsors could do their promos like that old show, it wouldn't be half bad. But most of the others were not nearly so slick.
Infuriate left and right
Years/decades ago I read a science fiction story set in a time when this ad-as-show trend had played to its logical conclusion. In this world, all music was commercial jingles, and musicians would play the popular "coms" for their live shows. The protagonist of the story was a musician who began creating music for its own sake. Queue the obvious, add a dash of O'Henry, bake until done.
Title, author forgotten.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Isn't this largely what TV was back in the 50's? "The Colgate Comedy Hour" etc... It's just TV going full circle and back to the pitiful whores they were in the first place.
Primetime infomercials basically.
If I had mod points today, you'd be insightful or funny. I'll have to settle for reminding the group of Mr. Data'somment in ST:TNG episode 126 (The Neutral Zone) that television died as an entertainment medium early in the 20th century.
Scifi has a long history of correctly predicting the future.
1 in 4 Maine children in struggle with hunger.
Would the show suffer so much if it was sponsored by Victoria's Secret, Smirnoff, and Trojan?
Nuclear engineers build weapons. Civil engineers build targets.
Sounds like a predecessor to "Demolition Man"
The problem you should have is the waste of spectrum on broadcast. Real change must come sooner or later.
Commercials as programs will be the only way to advert sponsor fund programs when NBC and friends are just another site on the internet (as they should be) and copyright law has been reformed for digital freedom. Will anyone watch? I doubt it. Every highschool and college in the world makes plays - these will be transformed into regular programming and distributed for free over the liberated spectrum.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I can understand how shows like Night Court (in which Harry Anderson, playing Judge Harry Stone, always had a Macintosh in his office) could feature a product without having it get in the way of a show. And certainly there are car companies that have had cars featured on shows or in movies, such as James Bond. But those were never central to the plot, so they didn't manage to drag things down like the proposed sponsor-centric content promises to. Even the show-within-a-show of The Truman Show didn't seem to have the nasty property they're talking about, since the plot focused on the character... the ads were just incidental ways to add revenue, kind of like hyperlinked ads in and around web articles or the hypertext-captioning of the Interstellar News Network on Babylon 5.
Your putting it this way made me realize--it's not just the creation but the ongoing generation of new episodes, not to please a fan-base but to exploit a fan-base. Moreover, as the product evolves, the show has to evolve to match... not just as the starting point of the series but for each episode. This means they can't take it where the show wants to go, they have to take it where the product wants to go, and that's going to reach a divergence. It also means that if the product is upgraded or sold or someone wants a "fresh angle", the show is going to be canceled on a dime without any regard for what the public wants. Because shows are about "what viewers want" and ads are about "what we want viewers to want".
This divergence of purpose bodes ill.
I used to write regular parodies of The Young and the Restless (out of irritation for where the writers were taking the show). In the process, I found that writing for characters that viewers understand is something where you can't "lie" in the writing. If you do, you lose the viewers. I'd start to write something trying to make it go a certain way and the voice of the characters would tell me "No, you have to go another direction. That direction is not true to my character." And it worked best to just roll with it and see where the characters would naturally take me. I came to a belief that what makes good writing is when the characters are alive like that in your mind, and the characters are writing a "true" story--not in the sense of non-fiction, but in the sense of following how life would really go. Sort of like method acting but for writing... (Ah, I see. There are no new ideas in the world. Google tells me that the term method writing I just made up is an already elaborated theory. But yes, like that. Count me an instant believer that there is merit in this line of thinking.) Anyway, my point is that the kind of cynical "we can make it go where it needs to go" writing is quite suspect...
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
(Have young kids, can't help but watch sometimes) Disney Channel - few, if any, traditional ads, but the whole bloody channel is an ad for itself and its Disney products - Hanna Montana, Kim Possible, High School Musical out the WAZOO. I can't think of a single commercial for something that is not a reciprocal ad for something on the channel itself. While it seems like show A sponsors show B sponsors show A (how could either make money if that were all), what ends up happening is each show's brand is built - and then they make a bazillion dollars on clothing, toys, posters, and concert tickets. While I'm not that impressed with the production value much of the time, the marketing approach's success is hard to deny.
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
Demolition man is a direct descendent of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Even down to the character names (John the Savage = John Spartan, Lenina Crowne = Lenina Huxley).
This has been going on already, corporate donated textbooks and televisions in Indiana schools. Everyday before school the kids have to watch a 10 minute program with corporate created content, that as I recall, also included explicit advertising. The schools accept the TV donations to improve their classroom's tech level and sign away the minds of the students to corporate influence. The content is largely repacked syndicated content and CNN stock footage as I recall, but I'm sure the contracts with the schools included verbiage to alter and include whatever embedded messages they saw fit.
The infrastructure to network a whole school and provide it with large screen TVs and DVD players isn't cheep, and shows the value of guaranteed access to young impressionable minds, even for only 10 minutes a day.
How much more would a full 8 hour days worth of access be worth? Enough for a corporation to establish a fully subsidized "private" school? One that payed and/or subsidized the parents normal public school taxes, essentially creating totally free schooling? The quality of education is obvious but to me this looks like the logical next step in corporate control.
Interestingly, it's more full circle than you might initially realize. The primary reason that spot advertising became popular was not the expense of television shows, but the desire for the television networks to break the control of advertisers on network programming. Spot advertising was first introduced on NBC by president Pat Weaver. Prior to that, shows were typically produced by the advertiser, not the network.
Now the show will be abut toothpaste, as a topic.
As Seinfeld demonstrated, you can probably get at least 2 episodes out of that concept. And refer back to it at least 7 times successfully using the laugh track.