Media Ethics: Issues and Cases 8th Edition by Philip Patterson, Lee Wilkins

Exercise 4

Was That an Apple Computer I Just Saw? A Comparison of Product Placement in U.S. Network Television and Abroad
PHILIP PATTERSON
Oklahoma Christian University
Michael Scott, the buffoon-like office manager in the Emmy Award-winning NBC comedy The Office , shows up at casual Friday encouraging his shocked employees to check out his backside in his new Levi's jeans. In the wildly popular ABC drama/comedy Desperate Housewives , Gabrielle (played by Eva Longoria) gets desperate enough for cash to model beside a Buick LaCrosse at a car show and for a mattress firm. In the now-canceled American Dreams , which portrayed American life in the 1960s, such American icons as Campbell's Soup and the Ford Mustang were woven into the show.
Hollywood calls it "brand integration." Its critics-some of them the very writers for shows using product placement-call it much worse. But by any name, the phenomenon is growing. During the 2004-2005 television season, more than 100,000 actual products appeared in American network television (up 28 percent in one year) according to Nielsen Media Research, generating $1.88 billion (up 46 percent in a year) according to PQ Media (Manly 2005). Advertising agencies have set up product placement divisions. Research organizations have cropped up to take on the task of measuring the effectiveness of product placement. And television shows in the United States seem to have an insatiable appetite for what they offer.
"The fact is, these brands are part of our lives, and brands exist in these television environments, so why not showcase them," said Ben Silverman, chief executive of the firm that produces The Office (Manly 2005, A14).
However, not everyone is pleased. In a 2005 meeting in New York during "Advertising Week," television writers protested outside a panel discussing the state of brand integration in television programming. Among their gripes: they want more of a say in how products will be placed and, inevitably, a share of the profits generated from writing a product into the script.
Most see the move as one of survival. Taking a cue from radio and its "soap operas," the original television shows were named for the sponsors ( The Colgate Comedy Hour and Texaco Star Theater ), and the audience had little option but to watch the ads. But while commercials undergirded the television industry for the first 50 years, the advent of the remote, and more recently TiVo have allowed consumers to avoid the very commercials that make the programming free.
"The advertising model of 10 years ago is not applicable today," according to Bruce Rosenblum, president of Warner Bros. Television Group. "At the end of the day, if we are unable to satisfy advertisers' appetites to deliver messages in new ways to the viewer, then we're destined to have a broken model" (Manly 2005, A14).
However, for government-sponsored television in Europe, the practice of product placement remains a sticky issue.
In a 2005 edition of Spooks , a BBC drama, a logo for an Apple computer appeared in early airings of the show and then was removed in subsequent showings after British print media alleged that the Apple logo and others had slipped into BBC programming in exchange for cash and favors, which violates BBC rules. In Germany, firings occurred after public broadcaster ARD was found to have had shows full of illegal product placements for years (Pfanner 2005).
Not every European country has such a ban. In Austria, public broadcaster ORF airs more than 1,000 product placements a year on its shows and provides the ORF with about $24 million in funds to supplement its budget of approximately $1 billion. The ORF says that allowing the placements actually regulates what happens anyway. "If you don't regulate it, it exists anyway, in a gray zone," said Alexander Wrabetz, chief financial officer for ORF (Pfanner 2005, A15).
And even within the BBC, which has not announced any intent to change its ban on product placement, there are differing opinions. One BBC executive, speaking to the International Herald Tribune off the record said, "Back in the '50s, everything was called Acme, or we stuck stickers over all the brand names. There isn't a TV company in the world that does that now. Viewers don't find it convincing" (Pfanner 2005, A15).
Ultimately, success in product placement still comes down to whether the placement fits the plot. "The needle we have to thread," according to Jonathan Prince, creator of American Dreams and now working on Madison Avenue, "is to have brand integration that is effective enough to have resonance, but … subtle enough so that it doesn't offend" (Manly 2005, A16).
Does the authenticity that real products such as name brand computers bring to a television show outweigh the intrusiveness of inserting a product into the plot of a show?