BigShinyThing

Andy Burnham, the culture secretary, has used his first big speech on broadcasting to voice his opposition to product placement. The minister in charge of what *you* get to watch also indicated he wanted to see self-regulation of violent, sexual and offensive content on the internet, somehow modeled on the 9pm television watershed.

Burnham is clearly living in lala-I’m-not-listening-land. Putting aside his ludicrous suggestions to monitor online content (good luck with that), his apparent dismissal of product placement is a Big Problem. Paid for product placement is increasingly looking like the only hope for beleaguered free-to-air UK TV channel ITV. TV ad revenues in recent years have fallen off a cliff and ITV had sought to make up the shortfall with money from gambling phone in competition lines. We all know how well that panned out.

Burnham asserts that product placement ‘contaminates’ programming. In the UK, many of our prejudices against product placement appear to have been formed from watching movies such as the Bond franchise, where placement is often clumsy and detrimental. This is strange, given that many homes have multichannel TV and are exposed to US programming - laden with placement - on both ITV and the myriad other channels. American Idol on ITV has to fuzz-out the Coke cups on the judges’ desk. But there is no such regulation of Horatio’s Hummer in CSI Miami, Dunkin’ Donuts in Will and Grace nor of the product references on reality shows such as Top Model. There’s simply too much *there*.

Moreover, US imports such as Seinfeld, CSI and Heroes are often held up as archetypes of fantastic TV. All are at least partially funded by product placement. Hell, they probably wouldn’t have been made had it not been for brands bunnying up the cash to be represented. Not that product placement is devoid of problems; script writers in the US continue to (rightly) complain that brands exert undue influence over the creative process. However, with an estimated $7bn to $10bn invested in product placement in the US every year, it’s increasingly hard to discount it as a revenue stream.

To be blunt, ITV and the UK advertising industry need product placement to happen. It’s their ‘get out of jail free’ card. With his ill-advised and ill-informed opinions on the subject, the culture minister may have just slammed the door shut.

Source: FT.

Update: Andy Burnham has also just launched a personal attack on the director of Liberty and leading human rights campaigner, Shami Chakrabarti. Clever.

We’re huge fans of the work TheyWorkForYou put into archiving and making accessible the process of British Government. And we encourage you to help them out with a bit of crowdsourced video-tweaking if you can.

Meanwhile, we notice that the august Beeb has started twittering from Parliament. Last time we looked they had under 80 followers (including us!), but give ‘em a chance. A nice simple way to maintain some peripheral awareness of What Goes On in politics.

Work from The Clipse, DJ Cam, Asbestos, James Dodd and many more. Dig in. Dig deep. Big up Adz!

As part of its California Video exhibition, The Getty launched a website called Video Revolutionaries. This website invited the public to upload their own video art inspired by the works of the artists in California Video collection. In spite of this request for work influenced by many of the outrageous and transgressive artists in the show, the website also lists criteria that the public’s videos must abide by. A list of rules and regulations imposes traditional censorship upon the applicants. The site then also gives the public rules on how they can interact with the videos on the website.

The “Video Revolutionaries” website states that all video posts will be reviewed by the Getty and deemed acceptable before being posted to the Video Revolutionaries website. It further explicitly forbids sexually explicit material, certain kinds of violence, and the use of any sort of automated voting methods. So much for artistic freedom.

Now, there’s nothing like a little bit of censorship to provoke the online anarchists. Hence a collective known as The Infinity Lab took it upon themselves to produce a number of very silly videos for the site which they then pumped to the top of the ‘most viewed’ list. They pretty much own this section of the site now. Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters would be proud. Small act of subversion? Yes. But also a reminder (as if one were needed) that the Internet remains an anarchic space. And one which brands and institutions should still engage with carefully.
Getty’s site rather archaically doesn’t allow their video to be easily embedded elsewhere, so you’ll need to click here to view the currently-top-rated content.

Via Nettime.

The New York Times magazine recently ran a profile of Tyra Banks about which there has been much bitchery online. She’s an easy target: utterly lampoonable yet ruthlessly ambitious. We think the interview is a masterclass in how to build a media brand and in how to maintain control. Particularly fascinating are the insights into how Tyra and her formidable mother London plotted her rise. Any fame wannabes should pay particular attention to the following:

Around this time, in the mid-’90s, Banks started gaining weight. Her agency made a list titled, “Designers who will not book Tyra because of hips and breasts.” They had a meeting with London and told her to put her daughter on a diet. “My mother told me the whole thing as we were walking down the street in Milan,” Banks said. “She said, ‘They say you’re too curvy. Let’s go order pizza.’ We walked into a pizzeria, and we discussed a career change.” Her curves dictated a different sort of modeling. “Tyra was always smart,” Veronica Webb said. “Tyra didn’t like clothes, and why should she? She looked great in a bikini. And in a bra and panties. That’s where the real action is in the fashion business: if you have great cleavage, you can make a fortune. When Tyra started to get really curvy, she signed a contract with Victoria’s Secret. For a black girl, that was incredible.

Genius. Instead of bowing to the dictates of the fashion industry, Tyra and her mother dictated back. Rather than moulding her body to the industry, Tyra diversified. Did the gamble pay off? Tyra used the platform of her Victoria’s Secret contract to create her own celebrity brand. We also suspect she maintains a lucrative relationship with the lingerie company: note how many times she refers to the brand when reminiscing about her modelling days. From her two shows — Top Model and the eponymous chat show, Banks now makes an estimated $18 million a year, and her net worth is around $75 million. Both shows are constructed around her highly ‘Bankable’ (the name of Tyra’s production company) persona. She owns 25 percent of “Top Model” and last fall Bankable Productions signed a deal to develop projects for Warner Brothers television. She wins.

(Full disclosure: Top Model is probably my favourite reality tv show format of all time. Those unable to fathom its appeal should probably read this.)