We detect a recurring meme on the subject of product placement as an alternative to advertising. An article last week in the Times made it clear that the cost to place a product in a popular TV show or movie can be roughly the same as buying an equal amount of advertising, and the impact can be singificantly higher. Yesterday, Rob Walker’s column in the Times magazine looked at the acme of product placement, Donald Trump’s silly television show called “The Apprentice.” In the last season of that show, teams of contestants were given the difficult assignment of producing an advertisement for Dove Body Wash—an actual product that won the right to be featured front and center for the low, low price of $2 million. Dove was less a placed product than a featured player, and they were undoubtedly thrilled with the results.
This is relatively easy to do in the surreal world of TV and film, where the line between fake and fact is gone—if it was ever there. In print, it is a much thornier proposition, although there is one very interesting way that it DOES happen. We’re not thinking of the redoubtable Carl Steadman, who once launched a website called “placing.com” that proposed to create an entertaining fictional narrative out of brand-names. (That conceit didn’t ultimately work, because the result inevitably looked exactly like hipster ad copy rather than fiction. Maybe it would be more convincing in the hands of a novelist, rather than a pranking disciple of Lacan and Derrida.) No, we’re thinking of the rise of targeted Google “ad-sense” panels. These are ads that are generated after Google’s search spiders have automatically crawled a body of text, and then generated advertisements based on key words. (This results in some pretty funny, unintended bedfellows, particularly at the more heated political blogs that have signed up for ad-sense.) The result is that technology is allowed to do what no human editor would ever do—place an advertisement directly adjacent to copy that refers to that product, service, or brand name. Why is this not a problem? Because readers are assured that it was the search engine that recognized the relationship, not the writers, editors, publishers or even the advertisers.
There is an editorial reason to place products that has nothing to do with a behind-the-scenes transaction: In an age of hyperactive consumerism and intense, ubiquitous advertising, successful brands become a kind of short-hand in themselves. No one has to ask twice what a NASCAR dad is anymore, right? We think it would be useful to develop a kind of dictionary for editorial product placement. It would be especially useful to understand the more subtle distinctions between closely related brands in the same market. (Please feel free to join in!)
Nike= Proud but aging; tarnished by scandal
Adidas=Resurgent, hip on the streets, possibly shoddy
Lexus=Bullheaded solipsism; flaunting neo-con values
Dodge=Utilitarian; never too proud to steal good ideas or theme music
Coke: Don’t fix what isn’t broken
Pepsi: No matter what the ramifications, more sugar
Budweiser: Lacking imagination, safety in numbers, xenophobic
Miller: Contrarian, willful, individualism
Cooking Light magazine: Living right is easy/fun/brightly lit/profitable
The Rake: Living wrong is easy/fun/brightly lit/profitable
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