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While SAG has been fighting product integration in its ongoing negotiations with the AMPTP, Hollywood writers have been fighting it in Washington DC. For non-insiders, that’s when Aiden on Sex And The City keeps talking about KFC, or when The Office refers to real corporations like Staples. (Though episodes of 30 Rock keep spoofing the practice, like when Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin spoke dialogue praising Verizon Wireless, and then Fey said directly to the camera, ”Can we have our money now?”) Specifically, the WGAW, which attempted to bargain this issue with the moguls and got nowhere, has asked FCC chairman Kevin Martin to help protect creative artists and audiences from product integration and its increase in use within the entertainment industry. The guild also called for a mandate on “real time” disclosure. In response to today’s decision by the Federal Communications Commission to issue a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on product integration in TV programming, WGAW issued this statement:
“While the WGAW applauds the FCC decision to seek federal rules to address the increasingly pervasive use of product integration in today’s television programming, the Writers Guild urges the FCC to require on-screen ‘real-time’ disclosure when product integration occurs, in order to make viewers fully aware they are watching a paid advertisement. The WGAW believes the most fair and effective way to alert consumers that products have been integrated into programming is real-time disclosure whenever a product is being mentioned, referred to, and/or exhibited, to help viewers differentiate TV programming from paid advertising.”
Among other concrete actions, the WGAW has called for the FCC to establish guidelines requiring on-screen real-time” disclosure on TV programming whenever product integration occurs “to make viewers aware of the range of products they are overtly – and more often covertly – being sold”. The WGAW has been active in the area of product integration fever since it published a white paper on the issue back in 2005. WGAW president Patric Verrone and TV writers such as Everybody Loves Raymond creator Phil Rosenthal testified before both Congress and the FCC last year on product integration and its implications for creative artists and the viewing public. And Verrone wrote to Martin on June 24th:
“Should the FCC initiate a rule-making process concerning the growing use of product integration, as recent news reports have suggested, the WGAW hopes this process will address the concerns of consumers and content creators.
“The concept behind product integration is the embedding of commercial products within the storyline of a program, so as to subliminally advertise to viewers. The hope is that consumers, not expecting to find a commercial within their program, will fail to realize they are actually being advertised to. This practice exploits the emotional connection viewers have with shows and their characters in order to sell a product. The WGAW believes that broadcasters must adequately disclose the products that are integrated into a story in order to insure that viewers know they are watching a paid advertisement.
“Additionally, we hope that the NPRM can serve to protect writers and other creative talent from the adverse effects of product integration. When writers are told we must incorporate a commercial product into the story lines we have written, we cease to be creators. Instead, we run the risk of alienating an audience that expects compelling television, not commercials. In support of these goals, the WGAW supports the following rules regarding the rampant use of product integration.
“The WGAW believes the proper policy would be to ban product integration from the already extremely commercialized public airwaves. We believe in principle that there should be a clear and distinct separation between advertising and entertainment content. As Andy Burnham, the United Kingdom’s Secretary of Culture so eloquently stated, “Here and now I do want to signal that there are some lines that we should not cross, one of which is that you can buy the space between programmes on commercial channels, but not the space within them.
“However, since that line has already been crossed in the United States, we believe the best way to alert consumers that products have been integrated into programming is for the FCC to create rules requiring ‘real time’ disclosure at the time the product is mentioned, referenced, or exhibited. Since DVRs and other such devices allow viewers to skip or fast forward through opening and closing credits, requiring disclosure at some other moment in the programming will simply not offer adequate protection.
“The WGAW believes that ‘real time’ disclosure will be the most effective way to protect consumers from disguised commercials. The practice of placing text along the bottom of the screen, also known as a ‘crawl,’ is already used by many networks to announce news reports, sports scores, stock market updates, as well as to promote upcoming programming. Since crawls are used with relative frequency, and viewers are accustomed to this practice, such a crawl would be no more intrusive than the warnings required for pharmaceutical ads or the network identifiers or ‘bugs’ that are now a mainstay of our TV visual field.
“In order to insure maximum disclosure to viewers, the WGAW believes that a crawl should appear for a reasonable period of time, should move at a reasonable speed, should be clearly readable by the viewer with a reasonable degree of color contrast between the background and the text, and should not include logos or other product-related graphics. In addition, we would hope that any disclosure rules would require the name of the product and the parent company to be included in the crawl.”
Editor-in-Chief Nikki Finke - tip her here.
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Aw Dave, did I hurt the witer’s wittle feewings with some truth? Get a clue, Dave. Advertisers and their products support the vast majority of television writing in this country. As such, if these things did not exist, none of these stories would find an audience to begin with. That is, of course, unless you’re naive enough to think that consumers would pay enough on an ala carte per episode basis to support the current business model. Moving on from that fairy tale…
Using real products on screen simply mirrors what viewers do every day in life. We all make choices in what we buy, Dave. And as a viewer, I’d feel more than a little insulted by some ridiculous on screen disclaimer telling me an advertiser paid to have that product in the shot. I’d have to be pretty damn stupid not to know that from the get go, right? How about spending a little less time worrying about protecting me from my own stupidity and a little more time improving the stories themselves? Then, maybe, when I’m watching a program, I’ll pay less attention to the Coke can and more attention to the narrative.
Just accept it: advertising is why and how television exists. Always has been. But the ethic was also to identify the commercials, not because the viewer couldn’t be trusted to tell the difference, but because the broadcaster didn’t want to take responsibility for them, just as websites don’t vouch for the “viewing experience” of links off their pages. The problem with commercials, as it now has become for product placement, is what comes along with the deal: sponsor influence in the programming. It can be as stupid as the famous story about “Playhouse 90″ being told by their sponsor, the gas company, not to mention “gas chambers” in “Judgment at Nuremberg” (the network fought it), or as subtle as network news shows avoiding certain stories because their corporate sponsors might be affected. Additionally, product placement reduces a show’s rerun and syndication potential; why would Post Cereals buy ads in a show where Kellogg’s is displayed, etc. (or do they replace it with expensive CGI)? In short, the problem isn’t commercials, it’s commercials that you don’t know are commercials. Look up the career of Edward Bernays. Meanwhile, we’ll be right back after this message…
If advertisers paid for the writing, then how come the advertisers can be substituted with a different advertiser when the show is rebroadcast? So your point is wrong. The advertiser paid for the time, not the writing. You are trying to equate an evil action with a neutral action so you can denigrate the neutral activity. You have our permission to try, but we don’t believe that writing is prostitution. Furthermore, most of us think that prostitution is better than the alternatives.
Oh, right. The Writer thing… Long ago I was a writer. It didn’t pay well enough to raise my four kids and young beautiful wife, so I moved on. Became a COBOL programmer… Those days were sweet. But the world didn’t stop. My most recent job has been, well, what you might call “A gear jammin’ Truck Drivin’ Man”, Not one you would ordinarilly associate with. One of those guys in the special section in the restaurant with the “Drivers Only” sign over the tables. Unsavory characters, those…
Oh, that other thing you said, that a’la carte thing. Back when I had my twelve foot dish out back and watched the network feeds, life in TV land was sweet. We only saw the network ads. The actual ads from the people who did put up the money to film some of the shows. But a young “Cracker” from Atlanta Georgia had an idea about how he could make everybody pay for “satellite television”. Through a series of brilliant, though criminal, moves he cornered the market. Everybody thinks they know that story, and that’s not the point I was trying to make. My point is, that half of the world now pays for a’la carte Television, and you are so “conditioned” that you jumped over that to shout the opposite point. You should probably go back to your sycophants now and leave the “Driver’s Only (but intelligent, argumentative writer-types are encouraged to join us) table.”
Okay, one last time…
1) Writing isn’t prostitution, Dave. However, television writing does not exist in and of itself. It exists because a content owner has convinced a distributor that enough viewers will tune in (and thus ADVERTISERS will pay enough for commercial time OR placement) to justify the license fee the content owner demands. The content owner uses this fee in part to pay the writers. No viewers, no advertisers paying enough for the time, no program, no writing. It’s just as simple as that.
2) Paying for cable television is not the same as ala carte purchasing of content, as one would on Itunes. Unless you live in a different land than the rest of us, you pay your cable company for a package of channels that you can’t modify very much. These channels are for the most part ad supported as well. With a typical episode of a typical series costing upward of $2.0MM per hour to make, the content owner would by definition need to sell over 2.0MM copies of each episode, at current prices, to stay in business without advertising. This isn’t going to happen any time soon. So I guess writers will need advertisers for the short term at least.
3) I don’t particularly care whether you drive a truck, write code, write a series or flip burgers for a living. These are the business realities. If you (and your friends in the Drivers Only section) choose to continue with the notion that I, as well as all the other viewers in this country, am too dumb to figure out that products on screen are there because an advertiser is paying for them to be there, so be it. I choose to give my fellow citizens more credit than you do.
The FCC should be more concerned with all the crap that appears on the screen such as promo bugs, snipes (many times for the same program in the bug), overlapping end/start of shows, and end credits flying by at 100mph so more promotions can be shown.