Businessweek online opens an article about a particularly interruptive advertising practice:
Toyota Motor has asked at least three major magazine companies to explore product integration – that’s product placement to you and me – of its cars
into magazine editorial pages. Say hello to another indicator of
changing media mores.
Changing media mores? Indeed. And looking more like desperate measures to me.. The magazine is not going along with the Toyota’s notions of its brand promotion. A mystified magazine executive (who, fearing a major advertiser’s wrath, insisted on
anonymity) said:
We’ll sell our mothers, but this doesn’t
work. I can’t sell you an article. I don’t even know how to price
it.
I hope it’s not only the fact that he can’t price it that is a problem for him… The future does not look bright to me.
It’s hard to get exercised about advertiser incursions into photo features about shampoos and cosmetics, and, just as The Contender is not 60 Minutes, Inside TV is not The New Yorker.
But suggestions like Toyota’s add a new dimension to the debate, and
even editorial purists concede that the media terrain is changing.Certainly, product placement "is becoming more and more relevant to every TV show," said Viacom Co-President Les Moonves this month, promising a "quantum leap" in
its ubiquity on TV this year. The irony, of course, is that this
practice arose so advertisers could break through a cluttered media
environment. But mushrooming product placements will soon create lots
of clutter of their own.
Sadly this does not look to me like the advertisers are getting the message from their ‘audience’ – "Do not interrupt!"
Mike Cunningham
on Jun 22nd, 2005
@ 16:32 pm:
Trouble is, the next best advert trick is just out there, waiting to be sprung on a presumably unsuspecting audience.
A long time ago, I worked in the Psychology department of a British University, and was introduced then to the theory of subliminal pressure and advertising. I was informed by the senior lecturer that the only reason it’s use wasn’t standard in the advertising world was because we human beings have an annoying habit of demonstrating different levels of consciousness. Which when translated meant that we might see something that we weren’t supposed to see, ruining the whole point of the exercise, which was to slip the message underneath our conscious threshold.
Terrible, us ruining a great idea like that, wasn’t it?