TVSquad

Interesting piece over at Nikki Finke's site. While everyone is concentrating on a possible actors strike (the deadline is Monday for SAG to make an agreement), there's another little controversy going on. The Writers Guild of America West has asked the FCC to look into the ever-increasing habit of product integration in network shows. Not only does the WGA want to see the use of products on television eased up, which the FCC is already looking into, they also want to go one step further and make viewers fully aware that they are seeing an ad.

And how would the networks do that?

Remember that song, "Everything Old Is New Again"? Well, it's true. In the old days of broadcasting, it was typical for the host of a show to appear during the hour or half-hour doing a live commercial endorsing the sponsor of the program. That old idea is being re-invented and ABC will soon announce that Jimmy Kimmel will be doing live spots on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Call it the ultimate in product integration, if you will, but it's just one more way for advertisers to guard against DVR watchers zapping through the commercials or live viewers clicking to another channel. And if they're smart, they'll make the commercials clever enough to be worth watching. The live ads will launch in May.

Is it really a big surprise that television advertising isn't as effective as it used to be? As TV watchers -- okay, we're uber-watchers -- we know that with DVRs and TiVos we're zooming through ads, or we're channel surfing in between segments of our favorite shows, or renting/buying content in formats that allow us to avoid commercials altogether. Now, according to the Association of National Advertisers and Forrester Research's TV & Technology Survey, we learn that six out of 10 marketers believe that TV advertising has become less effective in the past two years. And it's getting worse.

Guess which company had the most successful product placement on television in 2007? Nope, it's not Apple Computer, which would have been my first guess.

It's actually Tyson Foods. They got the top nod from IAG Research after donating thousands of pounds of meat to a family on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. Their brand-opinion index rating was 394. This score represented the most effective integration on TV in 2007. (I have no idea how they accurately measure something like that.)

NBC's 30 Rock makes fun of the network, television in general and, in at least a few instances, product integration. Product integration is the new way to get advertising money that's becoming more and more popular. The Office blatantly refers to real corporations like Staples all the time and football has John Madden's scribbles sponsored by someone now. Well, on a recent episode of Rock, Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin blatantly praised Verizon Wireless in a brief exchange before Fey turned to the camera and said directly, "Can we have our money now?"

Funny and lucrative apparently, as Yahoo! reports today that this was a real case of product integration, with Verizon paying for the "commercial" which at the same time was making fun of the very thing they were doing which ... wow, this gets confusing.