60 and Product Placement

Sam Ford at the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium blog takes a more in-depth look at the product placement debates that happened the ep before last:

A sketch comedy environment is an interesting place to test out these questions, and I thought Studio 60 did it well, with the producer standing up for the show and against the infiltration of commercial elements until he found an organic way to make the products part of a new set for the show reflecting the real strip. Reminds me of an ad back in January for King Kong that proved how Times Square makes the best possible backdrop for product placement within a show. But Kong seemed to generate a lot of discussion about product placement and branding.

Joe Marchese wrote a piece for MediaPost and beat me to the punch back on Tuesday after the show ran, recommending that everyone in the industry or who deals with product placement watch the show. Marchese writes:

The great part about the setting for the debate was the layers: the real show's writers having characters, who are writers and producers themselves, discussing the issues of product placement and possible solutions. All the while, there were all sorts of "the right kind" of product placements during the show. But getting to the right kind of product placement isn't easy. I have heard many people compare the need for separation between content creation and monetization to the need for separation between church and state, so product placement is obviously not something to be taken lightly. But in a world where the 30 second spot's effectiveness continues to be threatened, it is certainly something that needs to be revisited.

It's funny how product placement seems most appropriate when in the context of reinforcing those places where advertising has already become agreeable acceptable. I guess what I'm really getting at is the obvious point that product placement's gravest threat to 'content creation' is that it completely undermines the show's 'art' of imitating reality. As Ford points out, that's why product integration feels natural on reality TV because, as is famously contradictory, reality TV requires admitting from the get-go that it is not portraying real life.