| Aubrey's Outlook |
| Placing the Subliminal Bug in the T.V. Viewer’s Ear |
| by Aubrey Zich |
| Convenient plots created around the corporate sponsor’s need to sell, sell, sell. |
If there isn’t enough pollution on the Television as it is, now there are ads you can’t mute. So-called noninvasive advertising, where products are not only places in the show but the plot is built to include the product of choice. It isn’t just the camera lingering on a billboard for a few seconds or perhaps the camera focusing in on the protagonist’s pop can. Wired Reports: In a recent episode of the NBC series Medium, writers had to work the movie Memoirs of a Geisha into the dialogue three times because of a deal the network made with Sony earlier in the season. They even had the characters go on a date to an early screening of the movie and bump into friends who had just viewed Geisha to tell them how good it was. TiVo and other technologies that let the viewer skip over ads have caused Television sponsors to get desperate. They can no longer rely on a 30-second spot to sell their products. It is intrusive now, but in a few years when screenwriters will become copywriters and this new persuasive method of product placement inside shows will be almost subliminal. So much of what is in now is placed on what people do on television, more so with product placement. Is it a show or an advertisement with celebrities and an undercurrent of a plot? Doesn’t the average commercial have its own mini-plot? Hard to tell which is which, kind of makes you wish the V-Chip worked on incidents such as these. |
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