Europe is abuzz with debate about the likely legalisation of product placement in audio-visual content. In favour are advertisers and broadcasters. They see not so much a new revenue stream, but a veritable river.
To date, product placement has been outlawed in the European Union. In South Africa, commercial messages have intruded more and more into media content. Hey, it’s a consumer society. That car driven by the movie hero, it’s a BMW — so what? The cold drink positioned in a beach fashion shoot is a Brutal Fruit, not a Coke, who cares?
At stake is what academic Amit M Schejter calls ”the border between artistic expression and commercial speech”. This is because placing commercial products inside media content contrasts with prior conventions of separation. It’s different to the case where ”advertising is inserted within breaks in programming (or vice versa, as some might argue)”.
This ”vice versa” is important because commercial media exist to create content that will capture audiences who can then be flogged to advertisers. There’s no ”pure” content in this context. But within the commercial constraints, the rules of this game have generally been to run the advertising as separate messaging.
All that is now changing.
Sponsorship, as distinct from advertising, has already acclimatised us to consuming commerce inside our content. One can’t even imagine sports programmes that are unbranded. The difference with product placement, however, is that it’s usually less apparent.
United States movies shown in South Africa have long been implicated in product placement, dating back to alien flick ET, which featured Reese’s candy — which is not even on sale here. Nowadays, Hollywood customises placement for different markets — as described in a Wall Street Journal headline: ”Dubbing in product plugs: How Spider-Man 2 made Dr Pepper a star in the US and Mirinda a star overseas”.
Recently, The Matrix Reloaded‘s product placement for Samsung was reported as a major success by the marketing manager for the South African branch of the company. Home-spun film uCarmen eKhayelitsha was paid by Nandos for featuring its foods. (The movie also gave inordinate prominence to The Sun newspaper, although I could not establish whether this was paid for.)
Not just movies, but also television in South Africa goes trafficking in product placement. Big Brother was upfront about selling opportunities. The South African Broadcasting Corporation, despite being a public broadcaster, offers the same service on programmes such as 7de Laan, You’re Hired and kids’ show Yo.TV. M-Net’s Oracle airtime has product placement in series such as The Block, Project Fame and Egoli.
Last month, comedian Soli Philander walked out of e.tv’s show Let’s Fix It, complaining in effect that multiple sponsorship had changed to become product placement for a retailer.
Elsewhere, the practice is common not only in movies and television. It’s also evident in video games and music videos. It is reported that even Broadway plays are being mounted on this basis.
In print, novelist Fay Weldon recently wrote a book in which her story line includes paid-for mentions of watch maker Bulgari. Of course, worldwide, magazines — especially fashion ones — are infamous for running product placement as if it were independent editorial.
Is it all a classic case of credulous consumers being duped by criminal capitalism? Not so, says a US advertising lobby group, which argues that product placement is not deceptive because viewers already know that they are watching fictional programming.
It is certainly true that a lot of content with product placement does not trade on credibility or integrity. But that fact should still not exempt the purveyors from coming clean that their content has been cheapened — that audiences are being sold ”used goods”, or a double agenda, in a sense.
Recognising this issue, the EU’s new proposal is that what it terms ”surreptitious advertising” will remain against regulations. But it will permit product placement on condition that consumers can identify the commercial characteristics. Accordingly, it calls for notification about product placement at the start of affected programmes.
There are no such disclosure provisions in South African broadcast regulations. But even if there were, there is another objection to product placement that isn’t addressed by transparency.
This is that the practice can confuse people about the kind of content being consumed. Is the show you’re watching advertising that masquerades as programming, or is it a programme that just happens to have a couple of commercials embedded peripherally?
In short, it’s a matter of tails, dogs and dominant agendas. The concern is that intrinsic commerce can mean that the content can be designed, or changed, to accommodate the product. Who calls the shots becomes an issue — like when BMW makes cars available to movie makers with the quid pro quo that the bad guys can’t drive them.
The EU proposal does not deal with these complexities, although South Africa’s regulations say (vaguely) that product placement ”shall be subordinate to the content of the programme material”.
On the other hand, the EU does plan some limits on product placement. The goods may only be placed, not praised; tobacco and prescription medicines may not be placed; and the practice may not operate in religious, news or children’s programmes.
That’s different to South Africa, where only news and current affairs are excluded from product placement.
As if the matter were not complicated enough, the EU also wants its regulations on product placement to cover all audio-visual content, including that disseminated on cellphones or via the web.
At the end of the day, it can be asked whether debate around product placement really matters.
We are already deluged with commercial messaging in multiple modes. We even pay for the privilege of garments that make us walking ads for the manufacturer. Product placement as one more form of commercial sell — what’s the diffs?
The point is that if we’re to avoid becoming completely cynical about media programming, we should object to product placement when it is covert or when it is corrupting of content. After all, who wants to become habituated to the extent of being inured to critical consumption?
It’s a growing issue because technologies that enable viewers to leapfrog TV adverts will mean that product placement is going to increase. As in the envisaged EU system, disclosure should be compulsory in South Africa, even if it means an avalanche of such advisories.
Over time, a new norm will likely emerge where product placement becomes the predominant form of commercial messaging. We might then look out what would be a rare stamp of quality: ”This programme is free of product placement.” Bring it on, I say.