I blogged in April about NBC and its shameless use of product placement in its programming. As I write this now, it seems that things haven’t changed much at the “Peacock Station.” This comes at a time when NBC really should change its ways, considering the top entertainment story of 2010 was the Leno-O’Brien fiasco – a continuing publicity headache for the network.
NBC, however, refuses to change and, just recently, got called out yet again for its product placement in perhaps its most egregious and hilariously obvious gaffe to date. On fall episodes of its long-running soap opera series, “Days of Our Lives,” the actors, with no subtlety, have extolled the benefits of several products to one another and made sure the labels on each package were ready for their close-up. For example, in an otherwise serious scene, one actor takes out a bag of Chex Mix and explains that it’s “like a million different flavors in your mouth at the same time!” The good people of the internet have been criticizing the show and network for awkwardly pitching random products, crediting the comedian and actor Kristen Schaal (“Flight of the Conchords,” “Mad Men”) with first setting Twitter abuzz with news of the soap opera product placement.
ABC, CBS, and FOX have yet to adopt the "behavior placement" model. Yet. Until then, they are leaving it in the hands of traditional advertisers for commercial breaks between their programming. However, what led to NBC blurring the line between programming and advertising – DVR/TiVo – remains an obstacle for traditional commercials (not to mention the recent passing of the Congressional CALM Act, regulating TV commercial volume). As a result, the number of 15-second television commercials has jumped more than 70% in five years to nearly 5.5 million last year, according to Nielsen (and as extensively reported by the Associated Press). Previously, 15-second ads were mostly edited versions of 30-second or even Super Bowl-length spots, but that’s changing. Advertisers are finding that viewers are becoming more visual by nature and can still catch the images as they fast-forward on their DVRs or TiVo’s. So, it may not matter that viewers can’t hear the ads as loudly (thanks to the CALM Act) or that ads are shrinking in length — as long as viewers are visually picking up on each ad while fast-forwarding.
If traditional commercials are then surviving in the current TV landscape, where does that leave integrated advertising, as seen on NBC? It is possible to do this type of product placement without facing much (if any) criticism from the audience. For example, “Seinfeld” in its day was rife with product placement: Snapple, Häagen-Dazs, Bosco, Entenmann's, and Junior Mints. Yet, this was done to add a sense of realism, rather than randomly cram products down viewers’ throats. TV audiences arguably haven’t seen this “realistic” approach to product placement since “Seinfeld,” yet moviegoers have fared better. Starbucks and a fridge full of generic products were prominently displayed in Meet the Fockers, as was the FedEx logo in Cast Away. These films display the value of brand-name identification for realism; otherwise, the film viewer might not buy into the reality of a Brand-X coffee that the characters are drinking. Or, in the case of Cast Away, viewers might feel that the story depended on being associated with a recognizable shipping company, if only to provide a short-hand way of effectively signaling what it is that Tom Hanks' character actually does for a living, and why we should care. For every Fockers or Cast Away, however, there’s an Iron Man 2. The Robert Downey Jr. action-adventure is part of a $100 million marketing bonanza, as such brands as Audi, Dr. Pepper, Dick’s Sporting Goods, and Oracle signed on to be featured in the movie for significant on-screen exposure.
So, what does the future hold for product placement? There is no doubt that it will continue in TV and film, but already there are new areas where it is appearing, from music videos, to social media, to appearing on your mobile device or when surfing the Web. It seems inevitable that we’re moving toward a Minority Report-type future where we’ll be bombarded with products and ads everywhere we go. (My own shameless promotion: our client, SDL, offers a web content management platform that supports customer targeting, profiling and personalization of advertisements and other types of brand promotion.)
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