This Plug's For You
Thanks to ever more stealthy
product placements, ads are becoming the latest stars of the
show
By
JAMES PONIEWOZIK
Mark burnett,
executive producer of cbs's Survivor, likes to talk about
the reality game show's "17th character": the land. But as
integral as the wilderness are the brands whose makers pay
to put them into the game. Offered to the famished, isolated
castaways, cheesy snack crisps and sugary soda become not
just prizes but icons of civilization. "The premise is 16
Americans in a strange, deprivational world," says Burnett.
"You want these modern things from home, be it Doritos, Mountain
Dew, beer, gifts from Target." The goodies are to Survivor's
cast as apple pie and baseball were to G.I.s: symbols of home
and hearth, the stuff our guys and gals overseas are fighting
for.
Product
placement used to be simpler. Jerry Seinfeld gave shout-outs
to Snapple and Junior Mints (gratis) to give his sitcom verisimilitude;
The Price Is Right still pitches bedroom sets and floor wax.
But after Survivor's success, "product integration" (a step
past mere placement) is taking in-show advertising to a new
level of sophistication and stealth. Products are becoming
part of the show, be it the Taco Bell that's a site of a "murder"
investigation on a new reality show or an suv used in a TV-staged
transcontinental race. And producers and advertisers are getting
cozier than at any time since the days of Texaco Star Theater.
This summer,
on Fox's Murder in Small Town X, 10 contestants will solve
a murder mystery in a Maine town peopled by actors and well
stocked with Nokia phones, Jeeps and Taco Bell's grilled stuffed
burritos. On abc's The Runner, scheduled for January, a contestant
will travel the country, trying to elude capture by viewers
who will compete for a growing pot of cash, while driving
the cars, using the atm cards and scarfing the fast food of
yet to be signed patrons. "The runner lives in the real world,
just like you and I," says abc sales president Mike Shaw.
"If the runner eats lunch at McDonald's in Cincinnati or shops
at Sears, that's all very natural." A midseason WB wilderness-race
show is being co-produced by Ford, which supplies the suvs
the players will drive; the title, No Boundaries, is a Ford
ad slogan. Fox may even do placements in Temptation Island
2. (Trojan, call your agency!)
Such placements-sold
by the networks as packages with traditional commercials -offer
a new cash stream amid bottom-line pressures. No Boundaries
executive producer Kevin Beggs says that before he and his
partners secured funding from Ford, "there was interest, but
there was interest in a lot of shows." But after the sponsorship,
"we got an order from the WB for 13 episodes." (Says network
spokesman Paul McGuire: "The WB would not have gone forward
with the show unless we liked and embraced the concept of
the program.") There are longer-term pressures at work too.
Digital video recorders like TiVo are making it easier for
viewers to zap past ads. Commercial breaks-16 minutes or so
of every TV hour -have stretched the limits of viewer tolerance.
And this "clutter," plus the metastasizing of ads to benches,
bananas and buses, makes it hard for a commercial message
to stand out. "Commercial TV makes all its money from advertising,"
says Burnett. "You'd better make [advertisers] feel they're
selling product, or they're going to find new places to advertise."
Integrating pitches into entertainment, he says, is "the future."
Product
placement may change TV's past too. Video-technology company
Princeton Video Image has for years used digital imaging to
insert virtual first-down lines (with corporate logos) in
football games and completely photorealistic but nonexistent
"signs" behind home plate at baseball games. Now it wants
to move into reruns, with technology that can seamlessly insert
3-D objects into video footage-a Pepsi on a desktop, a Lexus
at a curbside, a box of Tide on a countertop-where there was
nothing before. PVI is negotiating to do placements in reruns
of Law & Order and hopes to strike deals with other syndicators
and even first-run shows. "You could sell a box of cereal
in the kitchen one [airing]," says PVI vice president Paul
Slagle, "and dish soap in the next." PVI's Holy Grail: customizing
insertions using interactive-TV technology-which is still
distant and speculative-that would store viewer information
(demographic details, even interactive purchases) as Web browsers
do. Your TV would figure, Slagle says, "whether you're riper
for a Cadillac or a Saturn."
In one sense,
placements are just like commercials: they spotlight a product
in an idealized, favorable setting. But they raise other questions.
Virtual placements could alter past producers' creative work
willy-nilly. As for physical placements, producers do disclose
their sponsors-but there's disclosure and then there's disclosure.
Viewers know commercials are scripted. But reality shows purport
to show actual events-how a player felt, how a product performed.
What if unscripted events don't follow the advertiser's script?
Contestants on Fox's Murder drive Jeeps. If one of them stalls,
does Fox cut the scene? "No," says executive producer George
Verschoor. "In fact, Jeep encouraged us to push these vehicles
to their limits."
But asked
the same question, Fox president of sales Jon Nesvig says
with a laugh: "I would hope the producers would probably use
some judgment there." At the least, producers would risk losing
sponsors. Says Debbie Myers, media services vice president
of Taco Bell: "We have tremendous equity in our brand. We
would never do this unless we were fully protected." And looming
over the rest of TV is the idea that after the success of
sponsored reality series, networks might want to sign up sponsors
for dramas and sitcoms, and advertisers could thus exert control
over scripts and story lines.
To ad-industry
critics like Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center
for Digital Democracy, the new product placements add up to
a return to the past-the 1950s quiz-show scandals were spurred
partly by sponsors' meddling-and an "Orwellian" future in
which "the TV begins collecting information on you." But Keith
Quinn, marketing vice president for LivePlanet, The Runner's
production company, contends that consumers will welcome "cool,
fun" and useful in-show ads. "We could ask on the website,
ŒWhat brand of car was the runner in last night?'" he says.
"If you answer correctly, you're entered in a drawing to win
the car. People would be psyched."
It's an
audacious and not necessarily inaccurate vision of the viewer's
relation to advertising today, a continuous circle of capitalism
and entertainment that blurs the line between your life and
the game, the ad and the show, consuming and playing. To Chester,
this vision is a sign that "the already tattered distinctions
between marketing and content are being obliterated." To consumers,
it may make no difference: in a May Time/cnn poll, only 13%
said they would think less of shows that took placements.
The dangers
for product placers may instead be the same as in traditional
ads: the audience. "Less is more," warns John Lazarus, senior
vice president of ad-buying agency TN Media. "If you do too
much, it's going to look silly and overcommercialized." Above
all, producers and advertisers agree, placements need to be
"organic"; an out-of-place product or overly enthusiastic
shill (remember Colby gushing over the Pontiac Aztek's capacious
luxury) breaks the spell. But organic is in the eye of the
beholder. Slagle says PVI recently made a demo with a rerun
of Bewitched, adding a box of SnackWell's cookies in the 1960s
kitchen of Samantha and Darrin's nosy neighbors, the Kravitzes.
"It absolutely fit in," he marvels. "They would be the sort
of people who would eat SnackWell's." Samantha will always
be in her time warp. But there's nothing to keep Madison Avenue
from twitching its nose and doing a little hocus-pocus.
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June 25, 2001 | No. 25
COVER
STORY
How
It All Ends
If you are still trying to wrap your mind around how the universe began-with
that Big Bang that created everything out of nothing-wait until you find
out what is coming at the other end of the space-time continuum
TRAVELERS
ADVISORY...
PACIFIC
BEAT: Aboriginal leader accused; coral corralled...
PACIFIC
OSERVED: Fraser vs. Wake...
THE
ARTS
TELEVISION: Stealthy product placements are
making ads the stars of the show...
CINEMA: Shrek's adventures in animation
MUSIC: Another hot album by Air
BOOKS: Un-endearing Indira Gandhi
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