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.

From advertising age, this story about a movie ‘non-placement’ that has created demand for a sneaker that doesn’t exist …

The unpaid inclusion of a nonexistent Adidas shoe in the movie The Life Aquatic has sparked a brisk consumer demand for the product. This custom-made version of the Adidas ‘Zissou’ is now for sale on eBay. Other Web sites provide instructions for making your own Zissous.