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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."
The significant point, however, is that the show comes first. By reversing the creative process and using product promotion as a starting point, not only is the quality of content likely to suffer, but the effectiveness of the advertising along with it.
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
Amnesty International
Make TV shows from ads?! That's so easy a caveman could do it!
My work here is dung.
Like they say, nothing new under the sun...
Another great reason to continue avoiding network tv.
expandfairuse.org
And after the DVR makes commercial-skipping so much easier. The business model must evolve. Unknown if it will survive. And while I know everyone will say that this will turn most viewers off, the truth is if it's entertaining people will watch.
I love this quote:
The collaborationBSOD jokes aside, I'm trying to figure out how you can communicate helpful technical product information in a science fiction drama show. Is it going to be like the time Jeff Goldblum used Mac OS 9 to take down the alien computer systems? Or is Rosario Dawson going to chase aliens and time travel with a Zune and an MSDN subscription? It's one thing to have a Coke can sitting in plain view, it's another to show how the protagonists succeed using shrinkwrapped software.
So when i pirate this quality content, are they going to try sue me? after all marketing is the entire point of this.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
So that means Knight Rider was picked up as a series?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
This was the norm on old radio programs.
Jack Benny centered who knows how many of his jokes on Jello. In the Whistler, people were always pulling into Signal gas stations. Sometimes going miles to fine one of those "fine signal gas stations". Fibber McGee & Molly even made the Johnson Wax pitchman the crux of their plots.
With lower costs in producing this kind of stuff it makes perfect sense. Everything old is new again.
They aren't really trying anything new so much as going back to the old ways of advertising. Ever heard the Jack Benny Program (also called "the Lucky Strike Program", "the Chevrolet Show", and other sponsor-reflecting names)? The show would seamlessly include little bits where the entertainers themselves sell you on the benefits of their sponsor's products. And the sponsors were definitely "at the table" affecting content in the shows.
I can't blame the networks. They have to get the money from somewhere.
re: Microsoft, Intel, and Cisco
So the heroes, they fight these companies then, right? Because with their collective ethical track record, to put them on the side of good would be...
Well, kind of fun actually. Like seeing darth vader sing a jaunty polka.
Granted, the networks and advertisers are kind of taking this to a whole new level, but this isn't such a new idea.
Ever listen to old time radio? I often find myself driving home from work in the evening at a time when my local NPR station plays an hour of old radio shows. Instead of cutting from the show to commercials, they often had commercials built in as part of the broadcast of the show. Burns & Allen, Bob Hope, Jack Benny, etc all often had their skits transition directly into an announcement from Maxwell House Coffee, Crisco, Kellogg's Cereal, Kraft Foods, or any one of dozens of other brands. Even outside of the comedy/variety show, sometimes scifi and horror shows would have some 'built-in' commercials, and shows from all kinds of genres.
Just wait, the "Mattel and Mars Bar Quick Energy Chocobot Hour" can not be far off. Check your local listings.
It might actually be an improvement over current Fox shows.
Between that thing they called a debate and this, I'm beginning to feel like I am living on the set of the movie 'Network'.
... that I don't think that people will notice. I mean, with the crap that's on today people are used to sub-standard programming. And that's given story centric shows. So, if you're masochistic, try imagining the raging pieces of crap that are product centric.
Bring on the The Mattel and Mars Bar Quick Energy Chocobot Hour! I know that what I really want in TV is amazing advertising and a by-the-numbers plot, not cruddy shows where the writers are unconstrained by advertisers and free to write based on the artistic merit of their ideas.
Now if they'd just replace the news (it's depressing and boooring) with this kind of quality programming, TV may be worth watching again.
If its The Microsoft Matrix" I'd watch it.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
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.
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
Science Fiction is usually reserved for programs or stories that are "close to" the known laws (but can violate one or two for dramatic purposes). Star Wars' "force" could be considered a single violation, their hyperspace the second, so that's still within what could be classically called Science Fiction. The third category, Speculative Fiction, is reserved specifically for programs that do not violate any known law and could plausibly occur if the context and situation described arose in practice. Given the limits of knowledge at the time the original book of "Contact" was written, this could be considered Speculative Fiction. It pushed the limits a bit, but was arguably within the bounds of what was known at that precise time.
Other "SF" categories probably exist, but those are the Big Three. By using SF rather than Sci-Fi, you avoid the problem of misrepresenting either a story or a category. Most people use Sci-Fi as the generic label anyway - Worldcon does, for example - so most people understand it as the generic form rather than the specific form, but the confusion that can cause is avoidable.
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)
Us Slashdot readers are far more intelligent, parking ourselves in front of a WoW screen with fly agape, saying "Thank you, Blizzard, may I have another month of grinding? Here's your cash".
Klingon programs don't timeshare, they battle for supremacy.
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.
"Tonight the world watches in horror as an Earthling is eaten alive on network television. This grim scene of unimaginable carnage is brought to you by Fishy Joe's. Try our new extreme walrus juice. 100% Fresh-Squeezed Walrus. Ride the walrus!"
Well, I've found a show where there's absolute no advertising whatsoever, not even hidden. It's obviously very old, from the time when there was no sound, and no colors. Indeed, it's so old that even white was not yet discovered; the screen is just black. That show seems to be sent 24 hours a day without a single advertising break, and no product placement either. It's not easy to find, because they didn't put it on those numbered buttons you usually use to select your channel, but they put it on a separate button, which they labelled "OFF" (I guess that's the broadcaster's name). I can only suggest that channel.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
If the experiment fails and the shows suck, then you have more evidence for the notion that sponsor control corrupts the medium. If it succeeds, it will do so by being genuinely entertaining - and we've essentially created a new medium for creative expression. I think that'd be a good way for big corps to spend more cash subsidizing the arts, even if only indirectly by giving more artists a day job that will give them the funds and experience to support and improve their real work.
So where's the downside? A generation of people who are emotionally invested in brands? We've already got that with the Apple crowd or the Coke vs. Pepsi debate. If this is dislike of legitimizing a long-form commercial, well, people claim to watch the Superbowl "just for the commercials". If it's entertaining, it's serving the same purpose as regular TV and popular commercials.
And it's not like you're being forced to watch these shows. The worst that can happen is that the sponsored shows don't really catch on, so they try it again by adding it to and ruining already popular shows. But then you people get angry and things go back to normal. Or, better, if it turns people off to TV, maybe they'll find something productive to do.
Do you mean "early in the 21st Century"? Because even on Star Trek TNG, incorrectly predicting the past != correctly predicting the future. Even in the TV Show at the Edge of Being Entertaining.
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make install -not war
You know, they're called "Soap Operas" for a reason. It's because the early dramas were funded primarily by detergent manufacturers in some of the earliest - and most effective - product placement programs.
This is a very, very old idea that seems to make the rounds every so often. No doubt, this will get tiresome after a couple decades, and the next generation will have this "radical" new idea to encapsulate the advertisements in separate spots rather than integrating them into the programs, and everyone will scoff at what a ludicrous suggestion that is. I mean, won't people just turn off the radio? Er, TV? Er, webpage?
That green slime had it coming.
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?
Except that 'Allow' will be greyed out.
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