TV: The Money Shot

Product placement has become a bit like air pollution. We may
grimace and cough when we catch a whiff, but most of the time we shrug it
off as part of the cost of living in modern society.

But brand-name products are more and more likely to make
less and less subtle cameos in both TV and film. The NBC drama
Las Vegas gives prominent play to the Mandalay Bay
Casino, which let the network film for free. Even less discreet:
The Restaurant, which gave as much air time to
Mitsubishi and American Express as to the reality show's handsome
chef.

On the other hand, marketers and their kin claim that they're
just defending themselves against clicker-thumbing, TiVo-wielding
viewers. Frank Zazza, CEO of a placement-valuation company called iTVX,
says placement has even become an aesthetic necessity in this branded
society. Imagine, he says, an episode of
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation without recognizable
products: "They find a clue, and where's the clue? In a can
of soda. They lift up the can and it says 'soda.' It
doesn't work."

What does all this product-enhanced programming do to an audience?
Does Johnny Six-pack object to being brand-handled? Armond Aserinsky,
director of the Aspen Institute for Media Psychology, thinks most of us
don't even notice. "The bulk of people who watch TV and go to
the movies are quite impervious to much of what they're
shown," Aserinsky says. "It all looks good. And it's
damned fast."

Assault people with too many absurd placements, though, and they
may rebel. Stuart Fischoff, a media psychologist at California State
University, Los Angeles, says the mall scene of Steven Spielberg's
Minority Report—crowded with shots of the Gap
and other retailers—caused a screening audience to respond with
"a wave of outrage and finally a tsunami of dismissive
hilarity."

Even consumer insurrection doesn't mean that advertisers have
failed, says Brian Wansink, a marketing professor at the University of
Illinois-Urbana: "My guess would be within a week, any sort of
negative effect—'That was sort of
shameless'—would turn into 'Dr. Pepper, that's
sort of cool.'" Cultural critic Mark Crispin Miller, author
of
Boxed In: The Culture of TV, agrees: "A
placement that attracts a lot of negative attention, spurs a lot of
ridicule, still may work at getting folks to buy." There is,
Miller reminds us, "a profitable difference between people hating a
commercial and not buying what was advertised."

Fischoff suggests that our responses to product placement may have
something to do with age, since younger people are more accustomed to
being deluged by ads. That's not always true, though. Andy Denhart, in his late twenties, who runs a Web log about reality TV, complains, "The Restaurant's product placement is lazy and
inorganic and only engenders contempt from the audience because the
products constantly interrupt the story." On the other hand, Nancy
K. Austin, in her fifties, found the churlishness and psychodrama
of the show more annoying than the marketing—at least after
catching the episode in which the boss charmed a balky bartender with a
free Vespa scooter. "Was Vespa a product placement, too, right
along with American Express?" asks Austin. "Maybe it was, but
all I could think was: Ciao, baby! I can't help it; I'm a
total sucker for Vespas."