"I feel television has died. It's such a make-the-doughnuts mentality. It's about finding 48 minutes of material so you can have 12 minutes of good commercials. If they thought they could get good commercials out of 10 people being naked and spinning on their heads in the middle of an island, that's what they'll do."
- Hill Harper (City of Angels) in TV Guide Online
The Purpose of TV
"Cable aside, the television industry is not in the business of selling programs to audiences. It is in the business of selling audiences to advertisers. Issues of "quality" and "social responsibility" are entirely peripheral to the issue of maximizing audience size within a competitive market."
There are many ways to talk about television. But in a "Business" perspective, let's be realistic : basicaly, TF1's job is to help Coca-Cola sell its product, for instance. To make the advertising message well received, the audience's brain must be available. Our shows are here to make the brain available, to entertain it, to relax it, to prepare it between two messages. What we're selling to Coca-Cola is available human brain time. Nothing is as difficult as getting this availability. ~ Patrick Le Lay, CEO of TF1, the main french TV-channel
Extremely strong brands - MTV, VH1, Paramount, Nickelodeon and E! - that allow us a fantastic relationship with those 'hard-to-reach' audiences. Our working mantra is: insight, ideas, partnership. We focus on advertising effectiveness, which means we care about results. How important is programming to children within this? Strong programming is essential in delivering the audience and representing the brand values.
 "This is significant when we consider that the most essential product of the advertising industry is hunger. That is, commercials are intended to create a feeling of lack in the viewer, a deep ache that can only be assuaged by purchasing the product. As Dr. Neil Postman, chairman of the Department of Communications Arts at New York University, points out, “What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer.” So we hand our children over to Madison Avenue to be told, hundreds of hours a year, how hungry, bored, ugly, and unpopular they are and will continue to be until they spend (or persuade their parents to spend) a few more dollars. And then we wonder why our children feel so hungry, bored, ugly, and unpopular, and why they are so needy."
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Using Psychology to Sell
"Advertising and marketing firms have long used the insights and research methods of psychology in order to sell products, of course. But today these practices are reaching epidemic levels, and with a complicity on the part of the psychological profession that exceeds that of the past. The result is an enormous advertising and marketing onslaught that comprises, arguably, the largest single psychological project ever undertaken. Yet, this great undertaking remains largely ignored by the American Psychological Association."
Advertising and Free Will
The Century of the Self - "The business and, increasingly, the political world uses psychological techniques to read and fulfill our desires, to make their products or speeches as pleasing as possible to us. Curtis raises the question of the intentions and roots of this fact. Where once the political process was about engaging people's rational, conscious minds, as well as facilitating their needs as a society, the documentary shows how by employing the tactics of psychoanalysis, politicians appeal to irrational, primitive impulses that have little apparent bearing on issues outside of the narrow self-interest of a consumer population. He cites Paul Mazer, a Wall Street banker working for Lehman Brothers in the 1930s: "We must shift America from a needs- to a desires-culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. [...] Man's desires must overshadow his needs.""
Freud's Nephew and Public Relations
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Product Placement / Branded Entertainment
Movies Loaded With Images of Junk Food - Health Day News
Product placements in movies: When they work, and when they don't - Cognitive Daily
Advertisers Up The Ante As Products Become TV Plots - CCFC
"Product placement picked up momentum when Reese's Pieces were portrayed as the favorite food of America's beloved alien, E.T. Fees charged by movie producers for placing brand-name products in movies range from $10,000 to $1,000,000. For example, Disney's Buena Vista Distributing offered to place brand-name products in Mr. Destiny for $20,000 to $60,000, depending on how the product was to be shown -- $60,000 if the star actually uses the product, less if it's just shown. " - Consumer's Union
Product placement - Wikipedia
Product placement - Source Watch
Branded entertainment - Wikipedia
Product placement - Center for Media and Democracy
Product placement in the DVR era - Using Irony to Sell
Product placement - How Stuff Works
There's something rotten about Enchanted. - Slate
Sundance First: Net Hires Exec To Sell Advertisers Branded Entertainment - Media Daily News
Has hidden advertising gone too far? - CS Monitor
Hell No, Merlot: 'Sideways' Alters Wine Market - Fox News
Television today disproportionately portrays the super well-off - who am i ?
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The Third-Person Effect
This Under-the-Radar (pdf) article makes a very good point that while people will recognize that the media can have large effects on others, they tend to discount it's effects on themselves. This is called the third-person effect. This effect helps to explain, I think, the public's blaze attitude towards television, and advertising in general.
Advertising and Free Will
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Using Irony to Sell
Boxed In: The Culture of TV (1988)
Interview with Boxed In Author Mark Cristin Miller
"There was a magazine in 1934 launched, it was called Bunk... its main purpose, the raison d'Νtre was to make fun of advertising, and all it was, was a series of parody ads, ya know. Now. Inside of two years, Bunk had become a premier advertising vehicle, you see? In other words, the advertiser had himself learned how to knock the product. The advertiser had learned to dispense with a kind of reference, solemnity, that had characterized a lot of advertising up to the '20s. Now a kind of jeering skepticism seemed to be called for. That was a very important lesson. One of the things I want to demonstrate in Boxed In is the ways in which both our political leaders and our mass advertisers have managed to use television to put across the same kind of calculated derision as a way to make people think that they see through things and to flatter the people for apparently seeing through things, but the point is that that penetration is only superficial, and doesn't really constitute a seeing-through."
Product placement in the DVR era
I believe this is the conceit of Media Literacy, that if you are smart, sophisticated and well-informed you won't get suckered. Instead, unlike the gullible public, you'll be savvy enough to see through any media manipulations.
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Marketing to Children
"Researchers at the University of Wisconsin and University of Michigan found that children aged three to five succumbed to the same marketing pressures as young adults, in that they understood the advertiser wanted them to buy something and that buying the product could make them happier."
Research shows that children under the age of eight are unable to critically comprehend televised advertising messages and are prone to accept advertiser messages as truthful, accurate and unbiased.
AAP - "Children, Adolescents, and Advertising"
"Children are big business. And that means my daughter is a popular kid these days. Taco Bell wants her, and so do McDonald's and Burger King. Abercrombie & Fitch has a whole store devoted to her. Pert Plus has a shampoo she'll love. Ethan Allen is creating bedroom sets she can't live without. ALPO even wants to sell her dog food. Even while I, like all American parents, am held responsible for the safety and behavior of my preteen, corporations spend over $12 billion each year to bombard her incessantly with messages that undermine my efforts."
"This is significant when we consider that the most essential product of the advertising industry is hunger. That is, commercials are intended to create a feeling of lack in the viewer, a deep ache that can only be assuaged by purchasing the product. As Dr. Neil Postman, chairman of the Department of Communications Arts at New York University, points out, “What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer.” So we hand our children over to Madison Avenue to be told, hundreds of hours a year, how hungry, bored, ugly, and unpopular they are and will continue to be until they spend (or persuade their parents to spend) a few more dollars. And then we wonder why our children feel so hungry, bored, ugly, and unpopular, and why they are so needy."
"In Sweden it is considered unacceptable and is banned for children under 12 with the approval of the majority of the population."
Companies are accused of routinely hiring child and consumer psychologists to "help them target children effectively", with devastating consequences for the health and wellbeing of youngsters.
"Regrettably, a large gap has arisen between the humane mission of psychology and the drift of the profession into helping corporations influence children for the purpose of selling products to them. The use of psychological insight and methodology to bypass parents and influence the behavior and desires of children is a crisis for the profession of psychology."
"A report of the American Psychological Association (APA) released today found evidence that the proliferation of sexualized images of girls and young women in advertising, merchandising, and media is harmful to girls' self-image and healthy development."
The Stepford Kids
"What most surprised me were the results I got from my study, which found that the more kids are exposed to consumer culture, they likelier they are to become depressed, suffer from anxiety, or experience low self-esteem. I would have thought it was the other way around that consumer culture was the symptom, not the cause."
Channel One
Channel One - How Much Remembered?
Consuming Kids: Protecting Our Children from the Onslaught of Marketing & Advertising
Watch Not, Want Not? Packard/Stanford Study Links Kids' TV Time and Consumerism
Effects of Reducing Television Viewing on Children's Requests for Toys: A Randomized Controlled Trial
Childhood for Sale: Consumer Culture's Bid for Our Kids
A Review of "Buy, Buy Baby: How Consumer Culture Manipulates Parents and Harms Young Minds"
Research shows that children under the age of eight are unable to critically comprehend televised advertising messages and are prone to accept advertiser messages as truthful, accurate and unbiased.
"A comparison group of children from Sweden, where advertising to children is not permitted, asked for significantly fewer items. It is argued that English children who watch more TV, and especially those who watch alone, may be socialised to become consumers from a very early age. "
"Identifying determinants of young children's brand awareness: Television, parents, and peers " - Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology (April 2005)
"Nine out of ten food advertisements shown during Saturday morning children's television programming are for foods of poor nutritional quality, according to researchers at the Center for Science in the Public Interest and the University of Minnesota." - Science Daily (April 2008)
"Spanish-language television is bombarding children with so many fast-food commercials that it may be fueling the rising obesity epidemic among Latino youth, according to research led by pediatricians from the Johns Hopkins Children's Center." - Science Daily (Feb 2008)
TV Food Ads Misleading Kids
TV Ads Add Pounds to Our Kids
TV ads contribute to child obesity
Researchers Say Prime Time for Kids Has Heavy Advertising for High-Sugar Foods
"A report published this month confirms that television is effective in getting children to eat the foods advertised"
"Children’s television networks show 76 percent more food commercials per hour than other networks and most of them are for high-fat, high-sugar foods, according to a new study." - Food Navigator (Nov 2009)
Other Countries Restrict Advertising to Children
Today’s children are unique in many ways from previous generations, but perhaps the most influencing on our young children today is Television advertisements.
"Sweden Pushes Its Ban on Children's Ads"
"How Alcohol Companies Launched a Digital Campaign Against America's Kids"
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