product placement

As I’ve noted on several other occasions, and will continue to note in the future, at times there is a disconnect between the publishing industry’s self-aggrandizing rhetoric about protecting the cultural soul of our nation (or any nation for that matter), and its omnipresent and often low-brow efforts to exploit that cultural stewardship for cash. (See also: hypocrisy.)

Here are two quotes from a blog comment I wrote today:

Marketing will always be trying to leverage content for its own ends because it’s in marketing’s best interest to do so.

…

Maybe in a decade (or two months), when you click a button on your e-reader to look at the next page of your novel, you[‘ll] instead get an interstitial commercial which you cannot bypass.

Before you roll your eyes at this bold prediction — and I say now that some e-reader marketing weasel will implement exactly this type of marketing fail — a brief history lesson is in order. Back in the 70’s, when I was just getting into paperback fiction, I happened to run across a novel that had a card of some kind wedged in the middle of it. Thinking that someone had left a substantial bookmark behind I flipped to the card and attempted to remove it, only to discover that it was bound to the book. [ Read more ]

Have you noticed lately how often a television show you’re watching will be interrupted on the fly by a promo, a logo, or some other form of advertising? It’s gotten to the point that I can’t watch Spongebob anymore because Nickelodeon keeps running ads for upcoming shows on the lower part of the screen – which right now you’re thinking is maybe the bottom inch, but I’ve seen them take as much as the lower third of the on-screen image. Or take some of the NBA games I watched this year, which included on-screen promos during the game that momentarily flashed close to the center of the screen, forcing your eye to acknowledge them.

I mention this because I think it’s a measure of the degree to which television has been trivialized in the current offering of entertainment options. Sure, taken as a whole television itself is still popular, but there are so many channels now that the model is more like that of the magazine business than anything else. And like the magazine business, channels are struggling to attract and keep eyeballs while building a brand, because building a brand on TV means doing intrusive things like having omnipresent on-screen logos, border ads, overlays, etc.

What’s interesting about this relative to interactive entertainment is that it wasn’t that long ago that people were worrying about product placement practices in TV, and wondering if it was going to destroy the business, or save it. Well, those concerns are long gone in TV land, but they’re soon to roost in the interactive industry, which is already tipping toward licensing as a means of catching the eyeballs of those same consumers – who today have a ridiculous number of entertainment options available to them. I’m already seeing intrusive overlaid ads on pages like Gamasutra (that irritating Radeon-slime ad), and I guess I’m wondering how long it’s going to be before I fire up a piece of interactive entertainment and have to deal with an omnipresent logo in the lower right corner of my monitor while I’m playing a shooter.

When that happens, I’ll know the industry threw in the towel on suspension of disbelief. I’ll also know that the part of the industry I cared about died.

— Mark Barrett

Publishing is for Professionals

Image Corruption