ARTelevision

Thanks, Sleepyjack.

I do regular searches for this stuff. Your bump moved me to update the thread with two items from The Australian , Austrailia's National Daily Newspaper:

Here's the first:

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Endless game of Where's Wally

For TV and movie viewers alike, spotting product placement can be like an almighty game of Where's Wally.

Product can find itself on screen for any number of reasons: from the standard product placement model where a company has paid for its brand to be featured, to deals where the production company is supplied with free product in exchange for its appearance – a model often used where cars are concerned – to incidental placement where no money changes hands and a brand just happens to make it on screen.

Fans of reality shows in Australia will be in little doubt about many of the sponsors of recent hits. Australian Idol leveraged its need for a make-up room and L'Oreal brand Maybelline came to the party, with t-shirt-adorned stylists getting contestants ready for their moment in the spotlight. McDonald's found its brand emblazoned outside the Sydney Opera House for show's finale.

On The Block, Black & Decker tools were always handy for the contestants as they drilled and hammered their way to stardom. Sharing the limelight were Panasonic, Masterfoods and the Commonwealth Bank, all of which were generously identified during the show and their products used by the contestants.

Stick around and watch the credits of an episode of the Seven Network's All Saints and you might spy the names OPSM, Sarah Jane or Roses Only headlined with the statement "Products and/or services provided under commercial arrangement". Over on an episode of Stingers on Nine, the producers give "thanks" to Siemens and Coffex Coffee.

But when it comes to product placement, TV is small beer – it is in Hollywood where the real deals are done. In the 1990s Mike Myers used his movie Wayne's World to lampoon just how big and blatant product placement had become, but even he could not have envisaged the master of the medium, super-spy James Bond.

From the moment he penned his first Bond book, Ian Fleming made sure brands had a prominent role to play, believing that the inclusion of real brands gave his books an air of reality. When producers committed Bond to film, they too cottoned on that a well branded Bond was a bankable commodity.

In the most recent Bond bonanza, Die Another Day, Ford handed over Aston Martins (after three movies featuring BMW placement), Jaguars and Land Rovers. Bond sipped Finlandia vodka and 7-Up, while a dozen other products vied for attention.

Simon Canning

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More on the same there:



The subliminal sell
By Simon Canning
11dec03

Production of the 2004 television season of blockbuster reality shows is well under way and the networks are casting for talent. Over at Network Ten, still swooning from the success of Australian Idol, executives are looking for dozens of contenders to decorate the small screen in its latest series, The Resort. Those who make the casting cut are almost guaranteed stardom and riches. But it is not just actors and contestants the network is hunting for, it's products. Products to perform for the camera and products to help underwrite the rising costs of giving Australians their daily dose of reality TV. Ten wants soft-drink makers, brewers, spirit companies, airlines and travel agents to sign up and get their brands on screen. This time, Ten even wants viewers to book their holidays at the Fiji resort while the series is being filmed. Welcome to the world of product placement, brand insertion or brand integration in the new millennium where advertising is fighting to break free from the 30-second TV commercial, and the networks are only too willing to help.

Product placement has been around in one fashion or another since the days of the radio soaps – so named because they were funded by the soap companies. In radio and the early days of TV it was a simple concept. The company funded the production of the show and was allowed to append its brand directly to the title, BP Pick-A-Box is perhaps the most famous example, but other shows to grace the TV screens in the 1950s and '60s included The Frigidaire Show, The Tarax Show and The Mobil Show. As the '70s arrived such overt branding fell from favour, but product placement remained alive and well in the movie business in the US.

Steven Spielberg is largely credited with ushering in the new era of product placement when he convinced Reeses Pieces to pay for a place in his hit ET. In the wake of the film, sales of the confectionery shot up 65 per cent and the future of product placement was assured. Today estimates from the US suggest the product placement industry in movies alone is worth $US360 million ($488 million) a year.

Now the advertiser-financed insertion of a brand into a TV show has turned into a burgeoning industry in its own right in Australia. All three TV networks have created dedicated divisions to look for opportunities to get advertisers into shows. Each idea for a show that crosses the desks of network programming executives is analysed for the opportunity to earn revenue through the inclusion of paid-for advertising within the show's content. A small industry of companies brokering product placement is also emerging.

If you have recently watched All Saints, The Block, Australian Idol, Big Brother, CrashBurn or any one of an innumerable collection of shows, you may have been aware of product placement. But then again, you may not have – and this is where critics are becoming increasingly concerned about the networks' desire to expand advertising revenue opportunities beyond the 13 minutes per hour now allowed by the Australian Broadcasting Authority.
Now some observers fear the Australian advertising industry is heading for a cash-for-comment-like crisis as advertisers meld more and more advertising into programming.

Charles Britton, technology officer with the Australian Consumers' Association, questions just how savvy to embedded messages consumers really are. "Do people know they are being promoted to?" Britton asks. "It's coming in under the threshold. I think in the 1960s there was a big debate about subliminal advertising. It was sort of like invasion of the body snatchers. If people don't know they are being sold to, then they don't have their own street wisdom up and running." Britton also questions how the Trade Practices Act applies when products are used within the confines of programming as a result of payment to the network or program producers by the advertisers. "There is the Trade Practices Act and the notion that representations need to somehow cohere with what the offering actually is. When you get to these alternative channels where is your guarantee that, in fact, the way it is being promoted is in any way related to what it actually delivers? And then if not, how do you get redress?"

In the US, the issue of product placement has reached boiling point after a consumer action group, Commercial Alert, which numbers consumer advocate and political activist Ralph Nader among its patrons, lodged a formal complaint with the Federal Communications Commission. The complaint has accused the principal networks, including ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX, of failing to comply with sponsorship identification requirements. "It is a basic principal of law and common morality that advertisers must be honest with their viewers," the complaint says. "Advertisers can puff and tout and use all the many tricks of their trade. But they must not pretend that their ads are something else."

Gary Ruskin, executive director of Commercial Alert, says that in the US rules are no longer keeping pace with the scale of brand insertion in TV programs. "During the last four years the scope, sophistication and intensity of televised product placement has increased dramatically. It has emerged as a kind of parallel industry to conventional advertising," Ruskin says. "The rules in the US as they are written are not adequate to the new challenges posed by embedded advertising, such as product placement, product integration and plot integration. In essence some programs now resemble program-length ads. Allowing broadcasters to identify the sponsors only once during an entire program, if at all, is wholly insufficient to match the subtle and complex efforts to persuade viewers to buy products via product placement."

Consumer advocates might be wary of product placement and the manner in which it is growing, but from the networks' perspective, they have discovered a small yet substantial seam of gold, which they are mining for all it's worth. One network that has been at the forefront is Ten, which was a leader in linking the content of shows with ad breaks from the early '90s.

Brian Gallagher, strategy and development manager, network sales, at Ten, is in charge of helping sponsors make the move from the commercial breaks into the shows and says it is a time-consuming process few advertisers are actually willing to embrace. He says three key factors need to be in alignment before an advertiser can successfully migrate into the environment of a TV show – the concept, consumer interest in the program and the product, and its connection with the consumer. "If we can actually find products that align those three things then we know we are going to have a successful campaign," Gallagher says. "With all of that, only a small percentage of the advertisers we work with give us enough time and scope to be able to address their marketing issues in an integrated manner."

Gallagher also warns that relevance is a key factor to successfully embedding a brand within a show. "We can formulate an idea to work brands into our format in a relevant way. Because if it's not relevant to the content that we're producing, it will certainly not be relevant to the consumer and the consumer won't recognise it as a valued part of the program."

With The Resort, where teams of couples will vie to win the right to run a tropical holiday destination, Ten is hoping to take the integration of advertisers into a show further than ever before, Gallagher says. "We needed to find people to help us fly people into Fiji," he says. "We need to find people to help us market the holidays, and in this case the resort is a business where we will be selling those holidays through retail channels." Such is the level of brand integration the show aspires to that a sponsored bar will be built in the resort. "The bar has the naming rights of a spirit company and they will be involved in setting it up. They will own the bar and will be able to run consumer promotions with a trip to the resort as a prize. We will give them two shooting days to make a commercial, which in itself will form part of the program."

Product placement can work in curious ways. Rice cracker company Sakata is rumoured to have spent a substantial part of its marketing budget simply to buy into Australian Idol. Ten then pitched in, getting the show's contestants to shoot a short ad singing the brand's monotonous tune.

A recent survey by advertising agency George Patterson Partners revealed that 78 per cent of people claim to have noticed product placement in programs. Further, 55 per cent said they did not like the idea of product placement, while the remaining 45 per cent said they did like product placement. Brands identified by those surveyed as taking part in product placement in programs included Coca-Cola, which boasted an unprompted recall of 33 per cent. Pepsi achieved a recall of 12 per cent, with respondents saying they had seen the brands in various shows. Mars and Pizza Hut's association with Big Brother paid dividends, as did Optus's inclusion in the latest series of the reality show. By comparison, sponsors of the Nine Network series The Block achieved recall of between 1 and 2 per cent. Those surveyed identified Black & Decker, Freedom, Dolmio and Masterfoods as having a role within the show. The figures might seem low, but marketers say the impact of such strategic placement of brands is worth far more than the initial investment.

The Block has been one of the most overt examples of product placement seen on Australian TV this year. The network partnership with Freedom furniture and Toyota has been hailed by both as a significant success. Freedom committed 30 per cent of its annual budget to the show as the main sponsors, while numerous others also jumped on the bandwagon.

Toyota was one company that was so happy with the impact its presence on the show had on branding and sales, it wasted no time signing up for the second season. Toyota's Nick Sadlier says the way the brand was integrated into the show was a vital ingredient. "I think the key thing for us was not just going beyond advertising into integration, but real relevant, targeted integration," Sadlier says. "The fact (is) that The Block was based in Bondi, the couples were all in the range of the target audience, and the uses of the car were actually in a competitive environment so the benefits of the vehicle could actually be communicated through the show without it seeming unnatural."

But while Sadlier is delighted with the outcome of The Block, he is unsure that the car maker will take every opportunity on offer to integrate its brand. "I'm sure we will be seeing a lot of this over the next 12 to 18 months," he says. "We get a lot of proposals, but I think The Block was unique in terms of the opportunity to integrate – we were much more involved in the production and that was the key to making it work." GETTING brands into TV shows can be half the challenge and product placement broker James Grant Hay says the Australian product placement industry is embryonic in comparison to the US. "We saw a niche opportunity in the Australian marketplace following the American example," Grant Hay says. "The product placement processes in America are well and truly 10 to 15 years ahead of Australia. The shift has come about due to media fragmentation, and from where we are standing the consumer or the viewer is more or less in the driver's seat. You have an incredible number of different forms of competing media out there and really it's no longer a case of interruption to the viewer, it's about engagement and that's what is driving product integration and branded entertainment."

But are viewers going to turn against the concept of product placement and the idea that advertising is no longer restricted to the advertising breaks? Grant Hay thinks not. "There is no end to its limit," he says. "However, it must be done in subtle form if the viewer or consumer is to respond favourably to it. That is why we are choosing to not participate in this style of, as I call it, blatant product placement which is somewhat intrusive."

Even so, he says that even blatant product placement has a high rate of acceptance with viewers at this stage in its life.
"I believe they will continue to accept that this is the way that programming is headed. Let's just look at the ratings for something like Queer Eye For The Straight Guy, which is the American model, but there will be an Australian version of that, and that has been incredibly well received."

Australian TV has learned many of its tricks from the father of product placement, the US movie studio – as ET demonstrated. Movies and product placement are an economy in themselves and the vast number of American movies coming into the Australian market means movie-goers are subjected to a form of cultural imperialism. One of the expected hits of the summer season is expected to be the movie adaptation of Dr Seuss's The Cat in the Hat. While there are no products placed within the movie itself, critics in the US have railed at the number of endorsements producers have attracted. In all, more than 40 different brands belonging to 12 companies have tie-ins with the movie. They range from Kellogg's to Burger King and Nabisco. Experts describe the film as having the highest level of promotional support ever seen in Hollywood.

From an advertiser's standpoint, product placement can provide an opportunity for branding and product demonstration, but the risks are high. Networks and producers need to bring advertisers in at the beginning of the process and the long lead time means it can be months before the results are seen. And if the show is not a hit, there is no way to recoup the investment.

Ten's drama CrashBurn was given substantial support by spirit brand Bailey's Irish Cream. The advertiser bought air time in the ad breaks, and when scenes in the show were filmed in some bars, the Bailey's logo was often prominent. But the show failed to set the ratings on fire and Bailey's distributor Diageo is said to be disappointed with the numbers the drama attracted.

The networks are also aware of the storm brewing in the US about levels of product placement and how such deals are identified. An amendment to Australia's Commercial Television Code of Practice now under review requires for the first time the disclosure of commercial arrangements in factual programs, but gives the networks the chance to consider each case individually. The code will not relate to entertainment programming such as Big Brother, but will apply to shows where people could be induced into buying a product featured, such as The Block. Disclosure can be by way of on-screen sub-titles or appear in the end credits. The code is expected to be adopted early in the new year.

But what is product placement in Australian TV worth? The reality is, no one knows. Last week in the US, ratings provider Nielsen announced it would be adopting a system of measuring product placement for the first time as networks and advertisers demand to know what the real impact of their investment is. The system could be up and running in Australia within a year.

James Parkinson, investment and development director with media buyer Carat – which was responsible for Freedom's investment in The Block – says Nielsen's move recognises the importance of product placement in today's TV environment. "At the moment it is incremental and you don't change a $2 billion industry by buying a few incremental placements. But it's not about bludgeoning commercials into shows. There has to be value for the advertisers and the viewers."

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To reiterate my basic theme in these posts:

We tend to want to believe we are not manipulated. We need to feel we are free agents acting with rational decisionmaking skills. We have a vested interest in denying the extent to which we are mindless pawns in multi-billion-dollar marketing strategies.

This doesn't help us much. In my opinion, we are like fish who are unaware of the water in which they are swimming and who do not question the wholly circumscribed nature of their existence within its container.

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