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. With Prime time murketing, and lots of it
Of course I was sad that New York Magazine never reviewed or otherwise acknowledged Buying In, but even so I was pleased to see they are interested in the broad topic of the murky line between commercial persuasion and culture, as evidenced by a big story on a very murketing-y topic: product integration. The writer, Emily Nussbaum, found some great examples, and makes what I think is exactly the right big-picture point:
It’s happened so gradually you may not have noticed—or, perhaps, haven’t cared. American consumers take pride in their media savvy; they are too hip to be fooled, too jaded to be appalled….
… “Most Americans, like the proverbial frogs in the slowly boiling water, may not notice how prevalent it has become. Yet Nielsen Media Research tells us that product integration has occurred more than 4,000 times on network prime-time television in 2006.”
… that proportion has risen vertiginously, jumping 39 percent in the first three months of this year versus the same time period last year. Within the top-ten broadcast-TV shows, advertisers paid for 26,000 product placements in 2007….
… And television integration is merely one ripple in a larger trend that also extends to “highbrow” art forms. In the recent revival of the musical Sweet Charity, the line “I’ll have a double Scotch on the rocks” was changed (with Neil Simon’s permission) to an order for “Cuervo Gran Centenario.”…
This is the post-TiVo click-culture counter-revolution I talk about in the middle section of the book: There’s no way to “zap past” these commercial messages, or the many others that Nussbaum collects in the piece.
Anyway, the article is definitely worth reading (and maybe it’s been highlighted already on marketing/ad blogs, but I hadn’t seen it until my physical issue of New York arrived yesterday), if nothing else, just skim through and fine the bit about Soyjoy.
And of course if you, or your friends at New York, are interested in murky forms of marketing, plenty of links, updated all the time, here.
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Kim Fellner's book 
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Reader Comments
Indeed, good piece of writing except for the egregious use of the very-untrue boiling frog analogy. People need to stop using that, no matter how convenient it is!
The 26,000 product placements in 2007 was up 21% from the previous year. Like SoyJoy, people didn’t think that GE’s Trivection was a real microwave when the series premiered.
Because there are so many product placements in shows and movies, when we see them we don’t even think anything of it, it is normal now. We expect fictional characters to name real brands now. And it works, if someone sees their favorite character drinking a Coke, they may go out and buy one.