Friday, January 29, 2010

Product Placement Is Growing... But Will It Work? A Clorox Story.

Clorox and Univision have teamed up to more deftly embed brand messaging into our entertainment by creating a prime time program with Clorox heavily involved. "There has been a change in the way we have thought about messaging, from commercial units to content," said Ellen Liu, director-media at Clorox.

Fine, okay.  TV ads aren't working and we have to figure out a better way BUT there's a scary part of this whole thing. Univision Studios is a new arm of Univision and it will serve to create prime time programming for advertisers to place product in - "The whole creation of Univision Studios, frankly, is to build on our capabilities in this area,"
That quote was from the head of sales and marketing.  Shouldn't someone who is involved in content development, someone involved in the creative process of show writing or... I don't know.... the head of Univision be commenting on the studio?  It seems shady for the sales guy to be so heavily involved in the programming.
I believe this, in a worst case scenario, will lead to programming around diet stories and cleaning or drive through Taco Bell runs.....
Anyone have thoughts on heavy product placement in our TV programming?

UPDATE:  Ford and Telemundo have a similar product placement agreement. Looks like the Spanish speaking world is leading the charge for programming around products.

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3 Comments:

Blogger Royce said...

That's an insanely brazen statement by the head of sales about how they are directing programming based on ads. It's like that ad executive ate a whole wheel of cheese and pooped in the fridge - I'm not even mad, I'm just impressed.

January 29, 2010 at 11:51 AM  
Blogger Caitlin said...

Great use of Anchorman lines in a blog comment Royce - haha

January 29, 2010 at 3:10 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...

Great topic Caitlin!

We've always known that ad sales drives the content we consume, but in my opinion there has always been at least an ounce of regard for the user/customer, but now Clorox has decided to throw that out window. I'm sure Clorox will garner a high recall on their product placement campaign, but at the cost of its consumers. Personally, speaking I'm turned off by any brand that pushes heavy product placement on TV programming. But, maybe it doesn't annoy others as much as it does me? Check out this Nielsen Wire Link on the most recalled Hybrid Ads of 2009 -> http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/consumer/most-recalled-hybrid-tv-ads-of-2009/

Talk to you soon girlie!

February 1, 2010 at 12:23 PM  

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