CSI:NY - Product Placement Prostitute
Product placement is getting rampant in television programs today…companies have decided that since we go to the bathroom or kitchen during commercials, they only way to reach us is to shove their products into the show itsedlf. The production companies are thrilled at this, since they get the money directly instead of being paid by the networks wheich are paid by the advertisers. The only person who loses here is the viewer, who has to sit through all the garbage.
CSI:New York has got to be the biggest PPP (Product Placement Prostitute) on television today; practically every episode of this program has some gratuitous product placement in it; last night, between the batteries and the music promos, I thought I was going to retch.
So you know what? I’m done…CSI:NY has been a distant third of the CSI programs anyway (being behind CSI:Miami with it’s annoying subplots and even more annoying lead is saying something), and the plots have been less than weak. Even with the strengths of the cast, this show has been putting the “b” in boring for a while now, but the product placement nonsense has finally tipped me over the line. I’m not watching this show anymore…so advertisers, whether buying commercials or paying to shove your product on the show itself, you’ve lost a set of eyeballs.
And later, I’m buying a pack of EverReady batteries, just to make myself feel better.
March 24th, 2007 at 12:05 pm
This stuff was normal in old time radio. Why is it bad on TV? Jack Benny would have lost some of his best gags if he couldn’t make fun of product placements.
March 24th, 2007 at 3:36 pm
(I’ll avoid the obvious argument that the nostalgic commercials were entertaining instead of blatently wedged-in for no other reason than selling a certain brand of batteries…)
Apples and oranges. During the early years of OTR, the sponsors were the program’s producers who then bought time from the network to air the program; this model dissapeared toward the end of the OTR era when it changed to the networks producing the programming and selling ad time, the model we currently use. Comparing contemporary product placement to nostalgic embedded commercials is specious; there’s simply no relationship.
Today, out of the hour only forty-two minutes are programming, the rest commercial messages for multiple advertisers sold by the network or affiliate (along with promos in unsold slots). We are now seeing yet another revenue stream for the producers, at the expense of the viewers. The network has already taken away eighteen minutes of the hour, and now it’s ok to subject me to even more advertisements? No, I don’t think so…