'TV Everywhere' Comes Complete With Unskippable Ads > Any other solution?

reply to Desdinova

Re: Any other solution?

It should still work well, once more companies embrace the advantages of the model. A high-budget show typically means a highly watched show and the cost for product placement rises appropriately. There are also tiers for participation: $250,000 gets you ninety seconds of background time, $500,000 gets you background time and use by a supporting character, $750,000 gets you close-ups of Johnny Depp eating your potato ships throughout the entire episode, etc. Sell ten of the $750,000 packages and you can easily finance several episodes of even the biggest budget show.

E.T. probably did more for Reese's Pieces than all of their broadcast spots combined.

Then at what point does product placement become more annoying and burdensome than 18 minutes of advertisements per 60 minute episode? Personally, I'd rather see advertisements every 15 minutes than products blatantly strewn around the set of a show. At least I can do something about the ads...

That's easy to answer. The eighteen commercials you suggest completely break the action and halt the story being watched. I suspect you're more concerned about framing the action more on the product than the story itself, and I agree with you that if such a thing were to happen (say a close-up of a Lays bag filling the screen while we only hear dialogue from offscreen) then that would be annoying and distracting.

But if the content creators use a little creative judgment, I don't see how it would be any more annoying or burdensome than just living in the civilized world. When you walk into a 7-11 and see all the products around you, does their presence strike you as distracting? If you have a friend who's eating from a bag of Lay's potato chips, would you insist they turn the package away from you so you don't see the label? We're constantly surrounded by products and it strikes me as unrealistic for any show to NOT have these products lying around.

When Castaway came out, a friend of mine was foaming at the mouth at the presence of Fed Ex in the film. So I asked him if it would have been somehow better if the film had contained the same level of saturation with a completely fictional company (like UBS or Federal Couriers). To me that would have been MORE distracting as it would clearly put the action Somewhere Else and not in my world. I'm willing to bet that if you glance around the room you're sitting in, you'll see quite a few commercial products. Why should it be any more distracting or disturbing if a fictional depiction of you glancing around the same room in a film or TV show ALSO contains these products?

Fair enough!