Long considered a bastion of ethical integrity, Germany’s influential public broadcasters find themselves these days embroiled in a scandal involving kickbacks from advertisers and the practice of sneaking blatantly commercial promotions into supposedly non-commercial prime-time shows.
Amid public outrage, the product-placement scandal has resulted in the unprecedented immediate dismissal of the production heads of Bavaria Film and Studio Hamburg, two well-respected suppliers of highly-rated public TV programming.
Media watchdogs meanwhile have called for new stiff new guidelines regulating ”sneak” TV advertising.
”Product placement” is industry jargon for inserting commercial products such as soft drinks or alcoholic beverages into film and television productions.
Product placement is commonplace on commercial television and in the film industry, where the practice is perfectly legal. The best example might be the BMW cars seen in James Bond movies. The carmaker ”loans” cars to the studio at no charge, the idea being that audiences will like what they see and rush out and buy the cars.
But Germany’s public broadcasters, funded largely by mandatory fees on every TV set in every household, are not permitted to have any advertising aside from 20 minutes of clearly labeled pre-primetime commercials daily.
So it came as a shock when German viewers, who finance the public broadcasters with hundreds of millions of dollars annually in mandatory fees, were told of lavish kickback schemes and blatant product placement involving huge sums.
According to trade reports, 117 product and thematic placements were found in Bavaria’s pre-prime time series Marienhof and seven in the studio’s series In Aller Freundschaft (In All Friendship).
And seven placements were found in the national network ARD’s top-rated Tatort (Crime Scene) series.
All together, the placements in the Bavaria series amounted to 1,4-million euros ($1,7-million) in illicit funding.
As a result, Bavaria’s supervisory board headed by Fritz Pleitgen, managing director of ARD member station WDR, fired Bavaria’s general manager and production chief Thilo Kleine without notice, and appointed finance general manager Dieter Frank as provisional director.
At the same time, Studio Hamburg managing director Martin Willich took rapid action in sacking his production head, Frank Doehmann, who had joined the Hamburg media complex in January after a stint at Bavaria’s subsidiary Colonia Media, which is also under investigations for production placement during Doehmann’s tenure.
In an interview with the daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Bavaria’s interim general manager Frank announced sharper controls on production and stronger guidelines to keep advertising and sponsors separate from film contents.
”The image damage is great, but we have drawn the necessary consequences. And the company is stable,” Frank said
Meanwhile, the WDR has pulled 67 films and two series scheduled for summer re-runs from its schedule as well as 13 top-rated Schimanski police thrillers pending reviews, Pleitgen said.
The move could result in considerable financial damage to the station, the largest single ARD network station in Germany.
Under German law, public broadcasters ARD and ZDF are allowed 20 minutes of advertising in pre-prime time and never on Sundays or holidays. Product placement is not allowed, since it would de facto undermine the advertising guidelines worked out in accord with the nation’s commercial networks.
While the ARD has established a clearing office against productplacement, the European Union’s Commission on Information and Media plans to work out new guidelines on sneak TV advertising.
The new ARD office headed by legal advisor Hermann Eicher, has the goal of ”ensuring independent and credibilty in programming”.
Its working group is to coordinate current investigations in product placement and measures to combat the illegal practice.
The group’s activities will also include contract stipulations for commissioned projects and supervision of the various aspects of the separation of advertising and programming, in view of the recent production placement violations.
Likewise the group will agree on and coordinate suggestions for programming observation controls.
In Brussels, Media Commisioner Viviane Reding is revising EU media regulations on grounds that new technical possibilities and increasing pan-European competition have rendered regulations set down in 1989 as obsolete.
”My goal is to create for the European Union a worldwide modern and flexible legal framework,” Reding said.
She has worked out a proposal that will form a discussion basis for the audio-visual conference to take place in Liverpool and September 20.
Ahead of the conference, Reding has called on media organisations to submit revisal positions, which could aim at watering down the current tight restrictions on TV advertising and product placement. – Sapa-DPA