Product Placement is Here

The TV Commercial Break is Ending

Stand by your beds! Product Placement is coming. Last summer the government passed laws which will make it perfectly legal for TV soaps and the like to "mention" and feature images of branded goods.

But it's kind of already started. Unless it was just me that heard Kevin Webster or one of his neighbours advise someone to get some Arneca anti-bruising cream after the latest street brawl in Weatherfield. Actually, Corrie has been trying out product placement for some time, in a sort of dress rehearsal to test it's effectiveness so they can compile data with which to sell it to advertisers when the law comes in.

I caught either Tyrone or Kirk praising internet auctions about a year ago - which is termed "generic" placement - because although nobody mentions the brand, everyone who hasn't just landed thinks of eBay. Then there's the full-on treatment. Arneca right now, presumably the entire contents of the supermarket aisle all in good time.

All this is just a slippery slope to wholesale changes to the story props, if not the story plots. What's betting Tesco's acquire BetterBuys and Peter Barlow winds up working at Ladbrokes ?

Bold as brass and tight as the skin on me Cumberland ring

The Idiots Are Winning

Last September the British Culture Secretary, Ben Bradshaw, did try to appease the cynical (me for one) by reassuring that children's programmes will remain unscathed and certain product sectors will be excluded - such as gambling and over-the-counter medicines.

Well, in what version of reality do children exclusively watch children's TV and what is Arneca if not an OTC medicine ? Any offers ?

Come on guys. It's up there with plans to put illuminated adverts in the dark tunnels of the  London underground. Short of living on the moon or underwater there will be simply no escape from the babble and the relentless background noise.

I first saw Jim Carey in Truman Show in 1998 on a flight. I didn't get it - although flight movies often have that effect on me. The next time I saw it on TV I got the genius. It was always one of those stories set in the not-too-distant future, like Nineteen Eighty Four by Orwell or Cormac McCarthy's The Road. The idea that the TV would be manipulated so that seemingly genuine storytelling would be subtly and therefore one may argue deceitfully pumping out shopping recommendations, relentlessly, sounded preposterous. Like those subliminal Coca Cola flashes in the 1970's, or sleeping tapes under your pillow. 

And yet here we are ! What's annoying is that, media-specialist trade titles aside, the press just isn't talking about it. That was to be expected. I never see anything in the papers discussing how the Defamation Act amendments and the Official Secrets Act have re-shaped the press so that it's not free to tell the truth it's just free to make money. It's hardly going to tell you how unworthy of your patronage it really is, after all. Read All About It. We've Gone Right Down The Pan.

How Did We get Here ?

The money side and therefore the reasons for how we got here looks something like this;

In the days of five channel telly, audiences were huge and channels like ITV could command a jaw dropping thirty grand per second for prime time advertising. That's why you only ever saw the big boys in the Corrie breaks, such as BT, Coke, Goverment ads, Kronenbourg 1664, PlayStation, EMI music signings etc.

When we started tuning in to Jack Bauer on Sky One, Andy Gray on SkySports and re-runs of Inspector Morse on ITV3, audiences split and fell in size. Advertisers refused to pay the same high rates as back in the day.

ITV got itself in a pickle in a bid to counter the fact of it's declining importance, so it cut a deal with it's clients as regards future advertising contracts. It promised that if audiences fell in years to come, the fees for the telly ads would fall in proportion. Because of it's public service broadcasting duties (not only the BBC has public obligations) and it's woes potentially coming home to roost at Westminster, the government was also involved in how this agreement was structured. It became known as Contract Rights Renewal. 

Now, with audiences at an all time low and shrinking (don't forget Xbox360, Facebook, iPhone and SkyPlus are all nailing the coffin, not just the footy, Gregory House and Doctor Jack), the money appears gone for good and the politicians feel partly to blame. Really, Contract Rights Renewal was kind of like officially saying to the advertisers that you can have your future discounts set out in black and white, thereby making them irrefutable.

So to make amends, the government has brought laws in to bring Corrie and the like more into line with the spirit of Trumania. Money out, money in. 

The on screen script may not decline in quality. I fancy it will sound more realistic. Just how we all talk really, minus the expletives. (Actually, Shameless with product placement will be about spot on for real working class dialect).

But the whole thing's a sell out. It's all fake from here on in. Scriptwriting as a craft takes a back seat. Artistry wave goodbye. And for me, the stealth of the project roll-out is the lowest of the low. But just as the newspapers never announced that their mission to tell the truth was replaced with a mission to maximise profits round about 1980, the telly is hardly going to pump you full of hard facts about the death of genuine impartial creativity in it's scripting teams. 

Turkeys have yet to vote for Christmas. And you don't see them billboarding the big day either.

It's Just Not Cricket!

In the long run I can't see it working, and yet the old model of adverts isn't adding up either. That's why we're looking at product placement in the first place. ITV (and other channels) have already asked the government for a slice of the TV Licence money that goes to the Beeb. It got refused. So bang goes another channel for putting bread on the table.

My money says we'll all be paying for TV content in the future. The ad-break model is dying with analogue TV (which itself has about 2 years left to live). Digital TV is the future, from your Wii to your Nokia, from your main flat screen set in the lounge to your iPod. Anyone with an iTunes account who's paid on a show-by-show or whole series basis for TV (I did this for Sky One's Lost in 2008) knows that there are models of pay-per-show already out there. And they work.

Change won't come overnight like a cold hard jolt. More likely it will be seamlessly phased in but pretty quickly I reckon. When the British Olympics are a distant memory, so will the national grid's surge when kettles got switched on at 7.40pm every Monday and Friday. And like I used to warm up the telly for my parents in 1977, because the old sets didn't come on straight away in those days, the commercial break will be a quaint notion of the collective memory. But I'm not talking thirty years down the line. I'm angling at ten years, tops.

So quick! Come sit back down. The commercial break is ending.

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