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Meet the “Promercial”
Further complicating the conundrum of branded television content, ABC – in partnership with Diet Dr Pepper – aired a round of “promercials” on January 5th that garnered the attention of both viewers and critics. In essence, a promercial integrates TV episode promotions with product commercials, and calls viewers’ attention to subsequent product placement within the...
Oh, Mother
While packing for Thanksgiving, I finally found time to clean out the old DVR, and stumbled upon a product placement doozy left over from October. Early this season the CBS series How I Met Your Mother, while generally good about keeping its content and commercials separate, set some program time aside to shill for Microsoft....
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Going Viral
Hi-Tec Sports has found the formula for a viral ad campaign that doesn't look like an ad campaign.
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A Sterling Campaign
After spending a lot of time looking at ads invading television content, it’s sometimes strange to see the reverse – television content invading ads. This is by no means a new phenomenon, but is sometimes done more cleverly than at other times. Roll it! Between the Lincoln MKX and his highly publicized book deal, Roger...
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One From the Vaults
As stealth advertising aficionados, we'd be remiss not to revisit this old chestnut. IT'S . . . the Friends Pottery Barn episode!
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Puppy Politics
Staying close to home this weekend, the hardworking staff couldn’t help but come across this campaign ad for Massachusetts State Treasurer candidate Steve Grossman (Dem). Background context: Grossman’s opponent, Karen Polito, has run a campaign stressing the need for a “fiscal watchdog” in the Massachusetts Statehouse. Roll it! … Um, who wouldn’t want to vote...
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An Exercise in the Bizarre
Have you seen the recent Adidas commercial for Derrick Rose shoes starring Ken Jeong? I don’t want to impugn the wonderful Ken in any way, but . . . . . . could this ad really ever sell shoes?
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One Day You’re In, and the Next Day You’ve Sold Out: Part III
Cue this Thursday's episode of Project Runway.
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Calvin Klein Billboard “Suggestive of Rape” Gets Axed
The Australian Herald Sun reported this Tuesday that a Calvin Klein billboard ad (shown below) would be pulled by the Advertising Standards Bureau, due to protests by sexual assault workers and women’s advocacy groups that the ad was “highly sexualised and clearly suggestive of sexual behaviour.” Reportedly, “the Board considered that whilst the act depicted...
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Eleven Herbs and Sell Outs
Last week’s episode of NBC’s sophomore comedy “Community” jumped wholeheartedly onto the product placement bandwagon, with a plotline that trapped the gang in a runaway flight simulator built and branded by Kentucky Fried Chicken. Yet, while the placement was undoubtedly heavy-handed, and reinforced by at least one traditional KFC commercial that aired during the program’s...
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One Day You’re In, the Next Day You’ve Sold Out: Part II
Unfortunately, last week’s post on product placement in Project Runway jumped the gun, pre-empting this week’s shill-a-thon for Heidi’s New Balance activewear line. The challenge was this: the designers were asked to develop three outfits that could be incorporated into Heidi’s line, with the winning looks being sold with Heidi’s other garments “exclusively on Amazon.com.”...
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One Day You’re In, the Next Day You’ve Sold Out
While Project Runway’s “pattern-making” challenge, now a tradition of two seasons, is certainly interesting, the sledgehammer promotion of HP technology on the show is anything but. Perhaps I’m a little overly sensitive, but after having suffered through eight seasons of L’Oreal, Banana Republic, Tresseme, Blue Fly, Piperlime, Elle, and Marie Claire endorsements, one more is...
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