Comments on: Egregious Product Placement: The Closer & Hershey’s

By: Cynthia Meyers

Cynthia Meyers — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 18:57:55 +0000

Hmmm, very funny about SPRINT OVERDRIVE’s overkill! Maybe the best placement strategy is to make the product’s integration so subtle that audiences don’t know if the product is placed (and paid for) or there for verisimilitude (and unpaid for)? The more confident advertisers probably already get that!

Tangent: How might the TV industry’s routine “greeking” of labels of products not “placed” (to prevent lawsuits over unpaid “clearance” fees to product makers) change? Have producers been using a threat to “greek” product labels as a way to extract product placement fees from companies? Have you come across this anywhere? Seems like the old model of producers paying to use a product should shift over to the product placement model–but isn’t greeking still happening? What have you noticed/heard?

By: Erin Copple Smith

Erin Copple Smith — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 18:21:38 +0000

Good question, Cynthia…and I don’t know the answer, certainly! 🙂 I think, like so much of product placement, some audiences will find it amusing and/or acceptable and others will be irritated by its intrusion upon the narrative. The fact that advertisers are now requesting for very blatant displays of product makes it more difficult. If Provenza didn’t have to hold the Hershey’s bar at an unnatural angle, with a medium close-up, for a few beats longer than seem natural…then maybe folks wouldn’t roll their eyes. In some previous seasons, for example (before the Hershey’s partnership, as far as I can tell), Brenda would open up her desk drawer to show that it’s full of Hershey’s kisses. No obnoxious labels, no lingering cinematography, but yeah–we all know what a Hershey’s kiss looks like, and it was clear that Brenda’s a fan.

It seems like the more overt the integration, the more annoyed audiences get…not surprisingly. It didn’t fit in with the Hershey’s deal, so I left it out of the piece, but last week’s episode featured a TERRIBLE integration of Sprint Overdrive (a product I didn’t know existed beforehand, so maybe even with the annoyance the ad “worked”). The detectives were trying to monitor a suspect via wireless, and then…IT WENT OUT! GASP! WHAT TO DO?! Luckily, Lieutenant Tao was there with his Sprint Overdrive, and everything was able to proceed smoothly. (Of course, in addition to the, “Here! Why don’t you use my SPRINT OVERDRIVE!” dialogue, the characters also had to IM each other about it. And we had to see the Sprint logo.

OK. I’ve gone on long enough. Suffice it to say…I don’t know if this new strategy will work, but it certainly is entertaining to watch, as both a fan and a scholar.

By: Cynthia Meyers

Cynthia Meyers — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 17:47:07 +0000

Too funny! So what do you think? Is this going to fly? In the 1930s, Rudy Vallee would “eavesdrop” on his “nightclub patrons” discussing Fleischmann’s Yeast, and a serial interwove discussions between a homemaker and her housekeeper about soap and the complexion. So is there enough irony in this new version of integration to keep audiences from eyerolling? (Irony being the strategy by advertisers to say “we know you know this is an ad”!) Or is too lame?

For me, any mention of any kind of chocolate (I’m not a Hershey fan) tends to create cravings….