NBC to Create Programs Centered on Sponsors 286
explosivejared writes "It sounds farcical when you first hear it, but NBC has teamed up with an ad agency to produce actual feature programs that are centered around promoting the products of the network's sponsors. The network has already begun production on one sci-fi program entitled 'Gemini Division,' which will act as a platform for products from Microsoft, Intel, and Cisco. The programming will be broadcast via the network's 'digital properties,' e.g. the NBC web site. I guess it was only a matter of time for something like this to come along after product placement became the norm."
Re:Wrong way round (Score:5, Interesting)
And I don't mind product placement in shows as long as it's subtle. The giant-sized HP logos on laptops always makes me chuckle, but ruins the immersiveness of the show (seriously, they're bigger than the emblem on the 9040 monster printers we use).
Re:Wrong way round (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not sure how that is so different from magazines with "product reviews" that are directly funded by the producers of the products they are "reviewing". As long as they don't marketing start producing the Evening News or writing content taught in schoolrooms, it won't be any worse than most of the mass market tripe that passes for entertainment. I find it far more disturbing when marketing is presented as a factual news program than when presented as a key part of a fictional storyline.
Re:Wrong way round (Score:5, Interesting)
Things almost look like they're coming full circle.
Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom. (Score:4, Interesting)
You don't even need to go back to the 50's. And it was a GREAT show.
No more commercials? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:So Easy! (Score:3, Interesting)
Freedom to do this is fair enough. I've no problems with the concept. What I have problems with is the fact that there are no significant alternatives in the US. PBS is massively underfunded and relies so much on commercial sponsorship that it cannot be considered an alternative. It also doesn't produce much in the way of range in programming. As far as I know, there are no other non-corporate, non-profit TV stations of any significance. Oh, there are some small operations that do local stuff, but you can't seriously expect those to produce anything to rival the BBC's 90's production of "Pride and Prejudice" or Paramount's "Deep Space Nine". I seriously doubt any independent non-profit operator would even have the budget for something on the scale of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's "Space: 1999".
Why is it important that it be non-profit? A commercial operator could do any of the above. Yes, they could, but if it is more profitable to produce commercials in the form of programs than to produce dramas in the form of programs, you can't expect businessmen to put art before money. Art is expensive and risky. Commercials are paid for by someone else and the income is guaranteed because it's paid for by the person doing the advertising. In addition to high expenses just for operating, many have shareholders to placate. Shareholders might enjoy relaxing, watching a good TV show, but they are going to enjoy watching their stocks go up in value even more.
Re:piracy (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course they can, even content-less commercials are copyrighted.
However, if this model becomes popular, you can just side-step the networks and distribute direct.
A few years back there was a BMW series of movie shorts that were unabashedly product placement pieces, but they were quite enjoyable.
In fact, I just found them again [bmwusa.com]
Of course, fast cars are inherently entertaining to many folks. I can hardly wait for the next episode of Kleenex Man!
Re:Wrong way round (Score:2, Interesting)
Plus it was the perfect way for new talents to go public with something.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Fibber Mcgee and Molly (Score:5, Interesting)
If sponsors could do their promos like that old show, it wouldn't be half bad. But most of the others were not nearly so slick.
Re:Wrong way round (Score:3, Interesting)
Title, author forgotten.
Re:Wrong way round (Score:4, Interesting)
Primetime infomercials basically.
Re:Vaporshows (Score:3, Interesting)
Scifi has a long history of correctly predicting the future.
Re:Wrong way round (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Wrong way round (Score:2, Interesting)
Sounds like a predecessor to "Demolition Man" [imdb.com]
Choice abounds, if you liberate airwaves. (Score:0, Interesting)
The problem you should have is the waste of spectrum on broadcast. Real change must come sooner or later. [reed.com]
Commercials as programs will be the only way to advert sponsor fund programs when NBC and friends are just another site on the internet (as they should be) and copyright law has been reformed for digital freedom. Will anyone watch? I doubt it. Every highschool and college in the world makes plays - these will be transformed into regular programming and distributed for free over the liberated spectrum.
The Program Lifecycle (Score:5, Interesting)
I can understand how shows like Night Court (in which Harry Anderson, playing Judge Harry Stone, always had a Macintosh in his office [macosg.com]) could feature a product without having it get in the way of a show. And certainly there are car companies that have had cars featured on shows or in movies, such as James Bond [carblog.co.za]. But those were never central to the plot, so they didn't manage to drag things down like the proposed sponsor-centric content promises to. Even the show-within-a-show of The Truman Show [imdb.com] didn't seem to have the nasty property they're talking about, since the plot focused on the character... the ads were just incidental ways to add revenue, kind of like hyperlinked ads in and around web articles or the hypertext-captioning of the Interstellar News Network on Babylon 5 [imdb.com].
Your putting it this way made me realize--it's not just the creation but the ongoing generation of new episodes, not to please a fan-base but to exploit a fan-base. Moreover, as the product evolves, the show has to evolve to match... not just as the starting point of the series but for each episode. This means they can't take it where the show wants to go, they have to take it where the product wants to go, and that's going to reach a divergence. It also means that if the product is upgraded or sold or someone wants a "fresh angle", the show is going to be canceled on a dime without any regard for what the public wants. Because shows are about "what viewers want" and ads are about "what we want viewers to want".
This divergence of purpose bodes ill.
I used to write regular parodies [anotherwayout.com] of The Young and the Restless (out of irritation for where the writers were taking the show). In the process, I found that writing for characters that viewers understand is something where you can't "lie" in the writing. If you do, you lose the viewers. I'd start to write something trying to make it go a certain way and the voice of the characters would tell me "No, you have to go another direction. That direction is not true to my character." And it worked best to just roll with it and see where the characters would naturally take me. I came to a belief that what makes good writing is when the characters are alive like that in your mind, and the characters are writing a "true" story--not in the sense of non-fiction, but in the sense of following how life would really go. Sort of like method acting [wikipedia.org] but for writing... (Ah, I see. There are no new ideas in the world. Google tells me that the term method writing [dickbentley.com] I just made up is an already elaborated theory. But yes, like that. Count me an instant believer that there is merit in this line of thinking.) Anyway, my point is that the kind of cynical "we can make it go where it needs to go" writing is quite suspect...
Consider the Disney Model (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Wrong way round (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:If done well, they can work. (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d36wUmJGzvA [youtube.com]
They also did quite a nice one with Snapple but I can't seem to find a video of it anywhere. Unfortunately most 30 Rock clips get taken down by NBC.
The Colbert Report's parody of a presidential campaign sponsored by Dorrito's was also quite hilarious.
Going from product placement to television is almost certainly a bad idea. I don't even know how that will work:
"Wow, I love packet shaping with my Cisco router using QoS!" "Me too, also my Intel Core 2 Duo is so fast, it blows women's clothes off" "Hey that was a blatent ripoff of the Italian Job, unlike Microsoft's Windows Vista that in no way stole anything from OSX....."
Re:Wrong way round (Score:2, Interesting)
The infrastructure to network a whole school and provide it with large screen TVs and DVD players isn't cheep, and shows the value of guaranteed access to young impressionable minds, even for only 10 minutes a day.
How much more would a full 8 hour days worth of access be worth? Enough for a corporation to establish a fully subsidized "private" school? One that payed and/or subsidized the parents normal public school taxes, essentially creating totally free schooling? The quality of education is obvious but to me this looks like the logical next step in corporate control.
Re:Fibber Mcgee and Molly (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Wrong way round (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Wrong way round (Score:2, Interesting)
As Seinfeld demonstrated, you can probably get at least 2 episodes out of that concept. And refer back to it at least 7 times successfully using the laugh track.