Product Placement: Insight

To PP or not to PP – and who bags the revenues?

Broadcasting regulation in the UK may have authorised product placement from March this year, but don’t expect the floodgates to open just yet. You won’t see wall-to-wall PP on British TV and there are plenty of questions to resolve as broadcasters and production companies tentatively dip their brand-endorsed toes in the water.

First there’s the question of how the money is divided up. PACT, the trade association that represents UK indie TV producers, is calling for a 50:50 revenue split between indies and broadcasters.

Commercial broadcasters stress that they are in the driving seat over what PP deals can or can’t be done – as they are responsible for ensuring that all deals comply with broadcasting regulations.

It’s fair to say that there’s a big slice of suspicion on both sides to make sure that they get a fair share of the cake. But then there are also questions of how big that cake will actually be.

In the US, product placement is reported to be the equivalent of 14 per cent of total spot advertising; in the UK that would put it at £450m. But the two markets are culturally and commercially very different, and more realistic projections suggest PP could generate £100m within the next four to five years. Both sides agree that it’s worth making the deals work to encourage more product placement. But even if the revenue split is agreed, other obstacles remain.

Some product sectors are off limits – tobacco, alcohol and sugary foods – and some genres are also excluded – news and current affairs, children’s shows and religious programming.

More significant for many indie producers is that PP isn’t allowed on the BBC. That funding route is firmly closed to the UK’s biggest broadcaster, despite the fact that it is cutting budgets to save money.

And then there is resistance to the deals. One concern is making sure the product placement isn’t so in-yer-face that it turns off viewers. But another thorny issue could be around on-screen talent.

If an actor or presenter uses a product on air, are they also personally endorsing the product – and will their agent want a cut?

In the US there have already been creative tensions, with the Screen Writers Guild complaining that its members were being ordered to write advertising copy rather than dialogue.

There are still quite a few battles likely to be waged yet as PP seeks to establish itself on British TV screens. This isn’t the end of the battle for product placement, it’s just the beginning.

Conor Dignam, group editor, Emap Media

Does a top show pushing fried chicken turn into a turkey?

“It’s easy to consider TV and film as the ultimate intersection of art and commerce. That intersection is manifested most palpably when product placement is implemented in a television show or a movie, which is now something UK viewers are faced with.

The instinctive reaction may be to groan at the idea of product placement ‘ruining’ programmes, making the art that people enjoy on their televisions every night more transparent to the commerce that supports them. And there certainly will be many cases when characters deliver lines of dialogue that don’t support the story, rather, the product’s copy message. And there certainly will be a sequence of shots telling a story that’s then interrupted by a close up of some product reminding us what brand we should be buying.

However, hopefully there will be moments where the placement actually supports the story. This has been happening more often in US television. One of the best dramas on the box, Friday Night Lights, features many scenes that take place in Applebee’s. The brand integration never feels silly our out of place. In this show they put authenticity above all else (even the cinematography goes more for authentic than beautiful… though to my mind that’s beauty). By setting Friday Night Lights in a restaurant chain where its viewers would think, ‘that is SO where those people would eat’, it does far more to set the tone and is far more immersive than if we cut to a wide shot of a restaurant called say, Applebaums, which would immediately take the viewer out of the story.

Recently, one of my favourite TV comedies, Community, had an entire episode devoted to product placement, in which the cast got stuck inside a space simulator built by KFC called the Kentucky Fried Chicken 11 Herbs and Space Experience.

Each episode of Community selects a genre to lampoon, and in this instance it was space movies. Utilising the placement of KFC products, they were able to send up the idea of HAL in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, with an onboard computer called SANDERS who declares, “Just as KFC’s secret process seals in the flavour, I’m sealing in the cabin’s air so you don’t explode on your journey”. You could not get the laugh, or the story, without the product placement.”

Danny Trachtenberg directs commercials for Great Guns in UK, Asia and Europe