Ads You Can't Skip: Sitcom Weaves Plot Around Seamless Product Integration

Even if you zip through the commercials with your DVR or block ads on your web browser, Fox’s hit sitcom New Girl shows us that there’s a good chance your favorite characters themselves are trying to sell you stuff within the programs and content you love.

Maybe you’ve accepted or gotten used to product placement as necessary to help fund your entertainment—maybe even retro-product placement won’t seem so weird in a few years (see our discussion of the Colbert Report’s treatment on this previous post). But product integration is a level beyond, where characters and shows actually deliver the product pitch as a “seamless” part of the plot. The opening clip from the New Girl episode that immediately followed the Superbowl kept the focus on the ads with Ford Focus focused jokes. Focus Jokus, Hokus Pokus…roll clip! [after the jump]

Step Right Up and Teach Ad Appeals with Tom Waits

The pitchman cometh! Given the Superbowl blowout last night, most viewers likely paid more attention to the ads than the game. Here's an amusing old song from Tom Waits' Small Change album (1976), "Step Right Up," which I recommend as a fun way to introduce a session on advertising techniques.

Using the lyrics, try grouping the various types of ad pitches in categories and them giving names to the techniques or types of appeals. Compare what you come up with to a classic list of ad techniques, like this or this. Challenge students to find or create commercials to exemplify the pitch techniques in Waits song.

The ultimate challenge: Make a mash-up of bits from commercials with a soundtrack lined up with the song. If you have a big enough group, with a few savvy video editors in it, the work could get done reasonably quickly to great effect--everyone will know and recognize those techniques! [So what?] Here's why that could be a good thing...

Control the Past and You Control the Future... with Product Placement!

Most TV, youtube and movie viewers understand the practice of product placement where sponsors pay for their brands to be integrated with video content and media makers get money for guaranteeing that their audience will see the ads--an important avenue to revenue in the age of DVRs and fast forward buttons. But what if networks and production houses could make money off ads in reruns? Well, a new ad company is selling just that service: digital revision to place products in syndicated reruns and old movies. Is this creepy? Or, a great opportunity? If your class can stomach an "abstract" sexually graphic visual (or, if you can stomach cutting the final side-splitting 30 seconds), this clip from the Colbert Report makes a great discussion starter.

Stephen Colbert facilitates future marketing by using ad-ready green screen surfaces.

Colbert's plans to include more ad-ready green screen surfaces into his sets and props as a way to facilitate future product placement in reruns of his show are the funniest part of the clip, but they also raise important questions about how new content being produced today might be affected by the prospect of future digital alteration.