Advertisers adjust to TV trends

As technology such as TiVo changes the way Americans watch TV, advertisers change tactics.
By GLENN GARVIN
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
When devious teenager Patty Pryor won a big college scholarship in an essay contest in last week's episode of the NBC 1960s family drama "American Dreams," viewers could be forgiven a certain amount of confusion.
Pryor and the nun schoolteacher who furiously orders her to the confessional box for cheating are fictional characters. But the essay contest was real -- it was won last week by a San Francisco teenager who plans to go to Stanford or Harvard -- and, most important, so was its sponsor, Campbell's Soup, which spent millions of dollars to work its tomato soup into the plot of "American Dreams."
"We absolutely believe we got our money's worth," said Campbell's spokesman John Faulkner. "We got 40,000 entries to our contest, and we got the attention of a teenage audience that it's hard to make contact with. Our overall condensed-soup business is up for the first half of the fiscal year, and we certainly attribute a big part of it to the promotion we did with 'American Dreams.'"
From movies to sitcoms
Product placement -- slipping a name-brand product into the background of a scene -- has been common in movies since the first coin was plunked at a nickelodeon more than a century ago. (Check out the Lever Bros. soap that appears in several 1890s features by the pioneering Lumiere brothers.)
But now advertisers, driven by commercial-free, video-on-demand services and digital recording devices such as TiVo that make it easier for viewers to zip by ads, are moving their goods into television shows. And products such as Campbell's Soup are no longer mere props on the kitchen table, but major plot elements:
U"American Dreams" built nine episodes around the Campbell's Soup essay contest and one more around a Ford Mustang, a father's present to a young Marine returning from a harrowing tour of duty in Vietnam.
U"Nip/Tuck," the FX cable network's drama of two plastic surgeons in the midst of middle-aged meltdown, did its own commercial-free episode sponsored by XM Satellite Radio. One surgeon briefly leaves his blind girlfriend in a car equipped with the radio, which she turns up so loud that she can't hear thieves stealing the wheels.
UOn "The Apprentice," the NBC show where Donald Trump puts contestants through a business boot camp, participants are assigned projects like devising a new flavor of Crest toothpaste or a new Mattel toy.
Nielsen ratings
Product placement has become so common on television that Nielsen Media Research has launched a new service to keep track of it. Just watching the broadcast networks and not cable, Nielsen's professional couch potatoes already spotted nearly 37,000 placements this TV season, on a pace to easily surpass the 54,000 of last season.
"What advertisers are looking for is to break through the clutter," said Marianne Gambelli, executive vice president of sales and marketing at NBC Universal, the network's parent company. "It's not just TiVo and other new technology, but a reaction to the whole television environment of 800 channels or whatever."
Not everybody is a fan of the trend. "Embedded advertising is totally deceptive," said Gary Ruskin, executive director of Commercial Alert, a Ralph Nader-backed group that is trying to wipe out the practice. "TV is increasingly becoming an infomercial medium. We're seeing a convergence between ads and infomercials in which it seems television is about to be swallowed."
Ruskin's group has petitioned both the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission to put legal curbs on product placement. But network officials, TV producers and advertising executives all say that's impossible.
"TiVo is the ultimate monkey wrench in advertising," said Jonathan Prince, the executive producer of "American Dreams." "I don't know if TiVo or video-on-demand is going to make over the universe. But we have to believe the future of television is going to include some models without 30-second advertising spots."
Realistic advertising
The belief that using real products serves a creative purpose as well as an economic one is popular in Hollywood, says Gary Mezzatesta, president and chief executive officer of UPP Entertainment Marketing; it specializes in product placement.
"That part of it's been going on a long time," Mezzatesta said. "There was product placement on 'Seinfeld' -- remember the episode where Kramer dropped a Junior Mint into a surgical patient? -- and even way back in (the early '90s drama) 'thirtysomething.' The more realistic the stories are, and the deeper the characters, usually the more they use real products. The whole goal is to connect with the viewer."
Which, he adds, is what advertisers want to do, too.
"Television advertising has never been a perfect medium," Mezzatesta argued. "In general, the greater your intelligence level, the less you focus on commercials. That's been a reality forever. But since TiVo came out, advertisers have been confronted with the false premise they've based everything on."
"All the millions of dollars poured into 30-second spots are now really being questioned."