The media pundit's pundit. Written by NYC insider Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine covers news, media, journalism, and politics.
Pay for placement
: The FTC is not going to require that product placement be disclosed. But the industry damned well should make it a policy to disclose it or no one will ever know when to trust anything they say. Does Jerry Seinfeld really like cereal?
You seem to be stuck on ad blogging lately.
Are you stuck on the breast of ’04?
I’ll have you know that the tribeswomen of the Tsimshian collect fish oil by sqeezing the fish between their bare breast an no one seems to be calling the FCC about that.
It’s not clear that it really matters, JJ. Are comics a class of people we should hold to an exacting ethical standard? I would hope not.
I like my comics shallow and sleazy, thank you very much.
WH reporters, on the other hand. . .
hmm – I’ve got to assume any placement is purchased, at this point. Kind of a funny deal, but unless it’s explicit I don’t see any choice.
Can you imagine how long the credits would run on “The Apprentice” with that kind of requirement, though?
I’m with gregburton: if I recogize the name brand, I assume it’s product placement.
Why? Because I grew up in the seventies, when you NEVER saw a name brand on TV or in movies(other than cars, where’s the names are hard to avoid).
There are exceptions, where real brands are used for verisimilitude. For instance, I think Mr. Seinfeld deliberately modeled his character on his own personality quirks, cereal preferences and all. Or for a couple of even more obvious examples: Jerry-Seinfeld-the-character pitched a sitcom idea to NBC; and it seemed clear that Murphy Brown’s “FYI” news program ran on CBS. That’s product placement of a sort, but I think it’s done more for verisimilitude.
Ditto on assuming that any name brand is product placement, with exceptions like Seinfeld. With Seinfeld many of the products mentioned are so intergral to the plot (Junior Mints, O’ Henry candy bars) that it had to have come from Seinfeld, Larry David, or the writers.