MARKETING Have hidden ads gone too far?

Companies are looking to market goods through product placement.
By DANIEL B. WOOD
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
HOLLYWOOD -- TV editor Scott Miller says he has twisted himself into a pretzel trying to bend plotlines to suit sponsors. In Game Show Network's "American Dream Derby," he had contestants swill Diet Dr Pepper during the show's weekly "fallout moments," when the teams quietly discussed strategy. On MTV's "Tough Enough 3," pro-wrestling contestants were taken to a local mall to visit Foot Locker, Coffee Bean and Jamba Juice.
"I remember asking the producers, 'Do we really have to show this? There is other more interesting stuff that is important to the story line,' " recalls Miller, a 31-year-old who has been working in Hollywood for five years. "Just do it," they said. "We have to."
Miller and his fellow members of the Writers Guild of America as well as the Screen Actors Guild say such pressures to place commercial products in TV shows and films have skyrocketed in recent years. They are calling for a code of conduct to govern the practice and say they will appeal to the Federal Communications Commission if production studios and networks don't seriously consider their proposal.
The two unions also want a percentage of the additional revenue that this advertising generates as well as health care and pension benefits.
"Viewers don't want to be sold something when they've tuned in to be entertained and informed, and writers don't want to have to become shills to an advertisement-driven media," says WGA West President Patric M. Verrone.
Saying the increased weaving of paid-for product advertisements into TV and film "raises serious ethical questions," Verrone adds, "The public has a right to be informed that they are viewing de facto subliminal advertising, and creative artists have a right to exercise their creative voices when required to participate in such advertising."
Report released
Recently, the WGA and the SGA released a report showing revenues from advertising within TV shows and movies exceeded $1 billion in the past year. The report described that product use had increased in films by 44 percent and in television programming by 84 percent in that period. It singled out the NBC prime-time hit show, "The Apprentice" for its use of advertising. In the program's third season, Burger King, Dove Body Wash, Sony PlayStation, Verizon Wireless, and Visa paid more than $2 million per episode to have their products incorporated into plotlines.
"High-tech tools have pushed out the commercials, and the commercials are pushing back," says Matthew Felling, media director at the Center for Media and Public Affairs based in Washington. He notes that several high-tech devices -- DVDs, TiVo, VCRs, and Web casts -- allow viewers to bypass or delete the string of ads on TV. "TV is having to create alternative revenue models. That's the price we pay for paying no price," he says.
To better handle how the entertainment industry engages in advertising, WGA and SAG have proposed a code of conduct with four main guidelines. It would require: a full, clear disclosure when viewers see commercial products or hear them mentioned in the program; a strict limit on integrating products into children's programming; a voice for storytellers, actors and directors "arrived at through collective bargaining" about how a product or brand is incorporated into the content; and an adherence to these regulations by cable TV, where "some of the most egregious abuse" of this integration happens, they say.