Hot Topic - Product Placement
For television producers, product placement is like having your cake and eating it too. Widely considered financial salvation, the fine art of sticking a branded product in a TV show has more critics. But even advertising people are wary.
Rules on advertising are getting tougher and, often, tediously specific. Ad rules appear in media laws, consumer protection rules and commercial codes. Regulators, lawyers all, delight in their craftsmanship as much as seeing broadcasters pour over every sentence and clause – and every new interpretation. It’s rare – and revealing – when a regulator explains it all.
Nobody – ever – said the folks at the Walt Disney Company aren’t smart. When broadcasters are ditching children’s programming because of ad restrictions, the Disney Channel is moving from pay-TV to free-to-air. Why not? The money is in the Disney products.
It’s the old story of killing the golden goose. Once the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) advised back in 2005 that TV product placement was perfectly ok without having to tell viewers that a product was being “placed” as an advertisement, then the networks and Hollywood just plain went to town on a new way to print money. There are shows today where it’s not uncommon to find from 3 - 5 product placements per minute.
Product placement is worth about $2 billion a year to US television and allegedly it’s worth $0 in the European Union, because it is prohibited for the most part. That European exclusion may soon come to an end, but with restrictions so the public knows what is going on.
The German term for product placement is “schleichwerbung,” and the director of one of the country’s largest public broadcasters calls it “the plague.”
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