Ads And Their Effects Are Equally Hard To See

The Age

Thursday October 16, 2008

Emma Young. Emma Young is a freelance writer.

Product placement and split-second publicity are blurring important lines.

IN TIMES gone by we, the viewing public, have been lambasted with images of a big-lipped smoking camel, orgasmic shampoos and emotionally rewarding soft drinks. This advertising hasn't always been wanted, but at least we knew what and where it was. Not any more.

Since the introduction of the digital technology TiVo and FoxtelIQ to the Australian market, people who might otherwise have spent the three-minute ad break being talked into wanting anything from a telecommunications package endorsed by a cartoon racoon to a Subaru now find it easier than ever to cut the ads from their viewing program altogether.

This evolving level of sophistication - apparently giving more power to the viewer - has spawned a movement of guerilla advertising that is ready to sell you something when you least expect it. Earlier this year regional news shows in the US started selling desk space to McDonald's. The outcome was evident in Las Vegas, where the news anchors for FOX 5's morning news took to announcing the daily list of local tragedies with cups of McDonald's iced coffee on display in front of them.

You might hope to dismiss this as something that could happen only in the twilight zone of Las Vegas, but similar deals have been struck with broadcasters in New York, Chicago and Seattle.

Product placement is a thing of the past as well as the present, most obviously in entertainment television and movies, but the appearance of McDonald's in news bulletins is new and the covert encroachment is ethically sinister. It signifies a blurring between what should be the distinct content of advertising and the editorial independence of broadcasting. The station's news director says that the cups could be removed if they had anything bad to report about their benefactor that day, but otherwise they remain - for an undisclosed fee, with undisclosed consequences.

Such contracts are part of an ominous trend where ad agencies are making their ads look less advertorial. Quasi-documentary style vignettes, in which advertising is repackaged to seem something like a happy accident, are getting closer to the norm. On Australian television screens, Georgie Parker has taken to dropping into the homes of other C-grade celebrities to discuss the merits of yoghurt; and reality programs, such as Football Superstar, are more about product placement than they are about reality.

Subliminal messages have also made their way onto our screens. Having recently been admonished for flashing logos in a speedy, hard-to-notice style during the screening of the 2007 ARIA Awards, Channel Ten was again exposed this week by Media Watch for treading a fine line with its blink-and-you'll-miss-it use of a Nintendo logo in Rove McManus' show, Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? It might have helped that, as the graphics had their millisecond in the sun, the host announced that "this is a very important part of the show".

Such lack of sincerity was taken to an extreme by the debut of Pot Noodle: The Musical at the 2008 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The musical was a joke (one of the characters was called Flick Ferdinando), but it was developed by the ad agency Mother London and the noodle-buying message was the motor of proceedings. The same agency also produced a feature film this year that was both funded by and about the good people of Eurostar.

Such machinations recall the Cartesian suspicion that we might just be brains in a vat being made to think a certain way by an evil demon - or by a Mother London.

The contemporary compulsion to sneak a "message" into diverting content is also attested to by the Disney release Wall-E, which, ironically, peddles an environmental message about the dangers of excessive consumption. When we've got a Disney film warning us against consumerism, it's time to take stock.

The division between the methods of old and new media have never been more cavernous. In the battleground of the American election, the Obama campaign's savvy use of social networking sites has mobilised an unprecedented amount of political activity at the grassroots level, so much so that it has even been referred to as the first "Facebook election".

Because the approach is so novel, there's no history of data to predict whether these

newly recruited people will actually turn out to vote on the day.

The same ignorance applies to the case of the McDonald's coffee cup. We don't yet know the precise impact of mixing the likes of a global fast food franchise with daily news bulletins, but it does seem to suggest that in the Darwinian challenge to adapt to the changing viewing and reading habits of consumers, ethics may not be fit for survival.

© 2008 The Age

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