So I’m sitting here enjoying a nice glass of Country Time Lemonade Flavor Drink Mix, thinking about product placements.
Twenty-four years after E.T. snarfed Reese’s Pieces, companies pay billions to weave their products and services into the storyline of movies and TV shows. The Da Vinci Code movie includes no less
than 25 featured brands, from BMW to Volkswagon. Reality TV shows like Survivor and While You Were Out could just as easily be called plotmercials.
Having saturated movies and entertainment, product placements and “paid media” are spreading quickly to books, magazines and even news programs. The heroine in a new young adult novel will talk about how much she likes Lipslicks, a lip gloss that Cover Girl is promoting through a marketing deal with Running Press, one of the nation’s largest independent trade publishers.
And Reuters reported earlier this year that revenue-hungry local news stations across the country are offering to incorporate products and services into newscasts “in exchange for buying commercial time or paying integration fees." Newsrooms in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Portland confirmed that they’re “integrating” product placements.
At this rate, we shouldn’t be surprised if the President grips a Diet Coke during his next press briefing. Like every successful mass-marketing idea, product placements are reaching media infestation, a growing swarm of brand names intent of weaving themselves into every nook and cranny of our information culture.
Which is why this Golden Age of Product Placements has probably already peaked.
The fact is that product placements and “paid media” are just advertisements pretending to not be advertisements. The more ubiquitous they become, the more certain that social responses will negate much of their marketing value.
First, there’s the discount-and-disconnect effect. Even tweener girls who thrill to the heroine’s lip gloss will eventually see what’s going on. Over time, consumers will become conditioned to assume that every brand-name product or service appearing before them is a sponsored sales pitch, worth no more than the same passive ambivalence they give most other advertising. Many will reject the content altogether because of the embedded commercials.
Second is the reveal-and-regulate effect. Information-age transparency will publicize the extent of product placements while fueling political pressure to crack down on them -- especially as embedded commercials proliferate in children’s books, magazine articles and anything sold as news. Watchdog groups like Ralph Nader’s Commercial Alert, trade associations including the Screen Actors Guild and university journalism schools lead a growing parade of stakeholders demanding that consumers be told directly when something they see, hear or read is a paid placement.
And FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein railed against undisclosed product placements in a speech last year, calling them illegal payola born of “a bottomless pit of commercialism in today’s media.”
Whether or not government takes serious action is anyone’s guess, of course. So how will we know when the Golden Age of Product Placements is closing its chapter in the history of brand marketing?
Easy. We’ll know that the end is near when forward-thinking entertainment and news media companies begin building their own brands on a bold new promise -- “no covert commercials.”
It may be the Country Time Lemonade Flavor Drink Mix talking, but I think it’s bound to happen sooner than later.
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