September 13, 2009Product placement: it’s already here, stupid!
The news that product placement is to be allowed on British television for the first time is, I think it’s fair to say, pretty massive. It’s a sea change in the way the government treats television here in the UK. I’ve posted before about the paternalist, even insidious level of top-down control over the airwaves in Britain. From that perspective alone, allowing advertisers to actually make use of programmes (as they do in the rest of the world) is an enormous change.
It’s also a very good move. Increasingly, we’re skipping ads. We’re ad savvy. I do it on the internet all the time: I use adblock plus. When I owned a television, I’d skip the ads with sky + (that’s a TiVo to friends across the pond). Or before the age of the TiVo, I’d resort to the less technical solution: I’d wander into the kitchen and make myself a nice cup of tea. Now I skip the television altogether and stream my content. I’ll let you guess how many ads I watch when I do that.
The advert has to evolve or die.
There are two ways it can evolve. Either ads get better at entertaining us, which is why we switch on the TV in the first place, or they get more subtle.
People don’t respond well to bad ads. Here are two I remember very well: the Cadbury’s gorilla and the DFS furniture “rockstar” advert. The former is an advertising classic. The latter is thirty seconds of pure pain from the devil’s own VHS collection. The “good” ad is a minute and a half long. Yet I challenge you to sit through ten seconds of the furniture advert without cringing. Go on, try it? Does it make you want to buy a sofa?
So as our tastes become more sophisticated, so our demands on adverts increase.
Product placement is the perfect way around that.
It’s not an advert for coke. It’s your hero, drinking a coke. See the difference?
Of course you do. Because product placement is already everywhere. It’s in films. Sometimes, film characters even endorse products.And does anyone else remember the Starbucks logo in Austin Powers II? How blatant was that? Did we mind? Did we think we were being brainwashed? No.
Product placement is a direct alternative to direct advertising. In an era when ads have a reduced impact, and many of us aren’t watching them at all, it’s not even a necessary evil. It’s just necessary. One of my favourite imports from the US at the moment is the brilliant Mad Men, a series set in an advertising agency in the early 60s. It’s full of product placement. Nobody complains.
But it can’t be done badly.
As my example of the two adverts — the gorilla and the sofa — shows, people respond to subtle endorsement. Or else, as the Austin Powers integration shows, you can be as blatant as you like about it so long as you’re funny. Or just be slick, like Mad Men.
Either way, UK ad agencies are going to have to figure out the product placement game pretty quickly. But there’s no need for it to stop there.
Television is a dying medium.
Product placement in viral video has been around for a while.
It looks to me like, once more, television is just playing a game of catch-up.
The rest of us are already on the web.
This entry was posted on Sunday, September 13th, 2009 at 1:25 pm and is filed under Blog, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.