Day: September 22, 2014

 

What
is
the
true
cost
of
advertising?

 

 

 

For starters, we pay a lot more for products and services to pay for advertising. So you pay to hear about something then you pay more to buy it. Brilliant.

Product placement and advertising have been around since the dawn of entertainment…I’m not swayed by either and I know people have to pay the bills, but it’s sometimes annoying; distracting from the TV show, books, movie; and can diminish the entertainment value.
For me advertisements are a perfect time for household chores, checking my email, reading, writing, exercising, visiting the privy, turning to another channel and forgetting what I was watching, etc. I don’t believe advertisers, so if I watch ads it’s only for entertainment.

Since the surge in streaming, DVDs, PVRs, etc. the TV industry has gone a little over-the-top with product placement to in-series advertising.

No matter your economic or social standing, you have Apple products, or you should have them, or at least that’s what they want you to believe.

In-series advertising is intrusive. A show stopper. It seems out of character for Temperance Brennan (Bones) to go into a spiel about how the car she’s driving can parallel park itself.

I tried to watch the first episode of The Mysteries of Laura which was actually a giant advertisement for Target and creepily over-focused on the children after a bath in Underoos of Batman and Superman.

Considering they’re Under the Dome there’s a lot of product placement, and they get the internet just long enough to do full-blown ads for the Surface Pro…At least it’s good for a laugh, my son was joking that they’ll be advertising for CLR next season – Dome getting stained, smudged, and covered in bloody handprints? New CLR for Domes will clean your Dome, no muss, no fuss, no streaks. Available at stores, inside and outside the Dome.

When I watch TV I want to be entertained…I want to try to solve the crime, see who wins the battle, travel in time, watch love, loss, redemption, hope…I want to see the stories unfold.

It’s fine to see Rick, Michonne, and Carl driving in a Hyundai, another for them to discuss how fast it can drive over zombies and the traction it can get despite the ooze. Maybe a new Hyundai shows that South Korea wasn’t hit by the zombie virus.

It’s one thing to see Bates using shoe polish on Downton Abbey, another for him to start peddling the product.Red using a smartphone, sure; explaining how he can upload The Blacklist to The Cloud, no.

Placing a product in a TV show, book, or movie if done subtly is a necessary evil, but when someone starts selling those items during the program that’s intrusive.

There’s a time and a place for everything. If it you can’t work it seamlessly into the story, don’t do it.
If I wanted to watch advertising I could, it’s literally everywhere. On the internet, phones, TV, books, songs, movies, clothes, charity events, public transit, billboards, amusement parks, sports events, concerts, in stores, everywhere, some day I expect to swim to the bottom of the local pool and see a Bounty ad painted on the bottom explaining how absorbent they are.

Now they’ve found a new way to trick people, Native Advertising, just another term for sneaky. Companies purchase ad space and news outlets pay someone to write a content piece that looks, for all intents and purposes like a real editorial piece, but it’s not, it’s ad space in disguise. A majority of people can’t tell if they’re reading a real weight loss article or an ad for Weight Watchers and that’s exactly what they want. A story about how smartphones help your children learn or an ad for a smartphone. It’s a brand new way to lie to the public.

Personally, I find myself disliking products that intrude on my entertainment, books, TV, movies. It should be my choice.

The true cost of advertising? No escape.