The Ratings Game (The Big Money)
September 19, 2008
In its five seasons to date, The L Word has broken a lot of barriers. The Showtime drama has, for instance, shown the whole world that there actually are shallow lesbians with restricted diets who wear patent leather. Now entering its sixth season, the show with the gay-for-pay starlets and soapy emotional travails will start to break a new barrier—the one between content and advertising.
For $300,000, any company can, according to Ad Age [1], buy an "integration package" on the show "that will either incorporate a brand into existing ‘L Word' storylines or allow the brand to work with the show's writers to create customized storylines, participating in one episode or across several." In other words, companies can, well, assert their masculine privilege over pre-existing L Word plots with their brand or write whole new shows full of brand-on-brand action. In the 1970s, a cache of conspiracy-chic writers worried in books like Subliminal Seduction that ice cubes in ads would be selling us hidden messages about sex. Who would have guessed that 30 years later, explicit sex shows would be selling hidden advertising?
And The L Word is not even the worst example of product placement and embedded advertising-only one of the cleverest. An episode of ABC's Desperate Housewives pivots on a Yukon Denali SUV. In the CW show Smallville, a character actually spoke the line "Acuvue to the rescue." In Sex and the City the movie, the product placement was so extreme that it could serve as shorthand for middle-class debt: Adidas, Bang & Olufsen, Chanel, Skyy vodka, etc., all had starring roles. (Hollywood scriptwriters have even complained about product placement.) Eight marketers were promotional partners in the film's release, either mentioned in dialogue or showing up on-screen. In return, they helped publicize the movie with parties, store events, and more. The film Iron Man featured roughly 40 brands, according to Brandchannel [2], including such unheroic products as Voss water. In 2007, the amount spent on product placement equaled $2.9 billion, according to PQ Media, growing more than one-third from the year before.
In reaction to this onslaught, a few policy proposals are now floating around. This past June, the Federal Communications Commission started to look at rampant hidden ads; recognizing that the use of DVR has increased them, it proposes larger lettering for product placement mentions on shows. Today, sponsors' names appear in that tiny antlike font that quickly rushes past you at the end of a film or show along with thanks to the films' caterers and on-set acupuncturists. The consumer rights group Commercial Alert has recently gone further [3] and asked that product-placement disclosures be placed in a larger font, last longer on-screen, and be accompanied by a spoken statement and that the labeling should occur before a show starts as well as at the end. This would be the equivalent of the list of ingredients that the FDA mandates manufacturers place on food products.
In a report released in June, the FCC examined ways they could ensure "the public is informed of the sources of program while concurrently balancing the First Amendment and artistic rights of programmers." (Were the founders really trying to protect our "artistic right" to shill bottled water and cheese-flavored whatsits?) While it's good that they are finally considering product placement an issue, there's a big problem: They don't have jurisdiction over cable or film.
Any rule changes, therefore, will almost certainly need support from Congress and the next administration. But why not go further and include the same list of sponsors on signs in theater lobbies-and perhaps even a full disclosure of what the filmmakers or television producers received in exchange for their placements? What if film tickets and cable subscription rates were prorated based on how much product-placement revenue these films and shows earned? Consumers would pay less for films or cable channels that heavily depend on embedded advertising. Another proposal: Any heavily sponsored program or movie would get a commercial rating in addition to one for gore and nudity. Rated B for
branded?
Of course, there are skeptics who wonder whether there could be a ratings system through which product placement in film and television might be thwarted. Yet the film rating system that many of us think of as utterly natural-that regulates sexual content in films and, to a far smaller extent, violence-is only 40 years old. In 1968, the Motion Picture Association of America created the first system that notified viewers of a film's content and restricted audiences, along with the National Association of Theatre Owners.
There were two conditions that created the groundbreaking MPAA ratings. One was the fade-out of the Production Code of America in the mid-1960s-a threshold moment when Elizabeth Taylor wasn't permitted to say "screw you" in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? but was allowed to say "hump the hostess." [4] The other was the rise of explicit and sanguine American film in the late 1960s-the period encouraged filmmaking that was more sexual, expressive, and somewhat macabre and at least gestured at "freedom," from Bonnie and Clyde to Easy Rider to Panic in Needle Park to M*A*S*H. Regarding the former, the late 1960s insistence on personal freedom made the return of another production code unlikely. Yet at the same time, the new violent, lascivious content of films in the period abraded some film viewers, especially religious ones. For the last four decades, the ratings system has sometimes been considered puritanical and arbitrary-aimed far more at sex than at violence, as documentarian Kirby Dick has argued in the film This Film Is Not Yet Rated. Still, as a regulatory system ratings have had their uses.
In contrast with the late '60s, our period is one of inexhaustible consumption and materialism, and the collapse of personality and aspirations into a culture of brands and logos. We are bankrupt and filling our seas with plastic. Yet we have no method by which to regulate-or even measure-the hidden ads the fill all of our many screens.
As with the MPAA's rating system in 1968, the commercial-ratings system for film or TV could slow down the onslaught of wall-to-wall sponsorship by making it more transparent. And if viewers knew beforehand that they'd have to watch 40 brands or more in a single film, they might choose not to see it. If brand sponsorship actually lowered the overall cost of, say, a cable subscription or a movie ticket, a whole lot of viewers could have paid a bunch less to watch kohl-lined Shane on The L Word prance around in men's underwear made (and paid for) by Hugo Boss. If audiences know a film or a television show has been rated B for branded before they see it, they might feel a little more in control of the experience.
Links:
[1] http://adage.com/madisonandvine/article?article_id=130206
[2] http://www.brandchannel.com/brandcameo_films.asp
[3] http://www.commercialalert.org/news/news-releases/2008/06/commercial-alert-response-to-fcc-product-placement-rulemaking-agency-sidesteps-real-solution
[4] http://www.mpaa.org/Ratings_HowItAllBegan.asp