Nice Product Placement!
Joan of Arcadia (CBS, Fridays) just had the best product placement I've ever seen. Most TV shows or movies are content to simply show a billboard, a poster, or a product container. But tonight's episode of Joan worked a bag of Bugles into the script. It was so much like real life. Man it was cool! Later they did a couple almost-as-nice references to Apple's iPod. Yeah, I know there are better things to get excited about and I'll be back to my old jaded self soon. But it was cool.
If you've been even a mild newshound you've probably heard that commercial advertising as we know it is dying and that product placement is seen as the salvation of advertisers. People cut their ad-boycotting teeth with the VCR by using the remote to zip through TV adverts. Now the Digital Video Recorder (DVR) is letting them go full-chomp and is causing an upheaval in the advertising industry.
But the revolution is birthing its own backlash. The New York Times reports that an "organization, Commercial Alert, in Portland, Ore., called on the [FTC] in September 2003 to require that placements be prominently identified with a superimposed message like 'advertisement' as they occur during programming."
Now that end credits are being formatted for the other trend of running spots at the end of a program I don't mind the tactic as much as I used to when it first began. But the idea of "branding" a product placement would be truly annoying. I think it's bad enough that we have the network identifiers barely hidden in the corner of each program. Worse are the TV networks like FX that steal the bottom of the screen after coming back from an advert break to splash color and sound banners for their other programs.
