BROOKE GLADSTONE:
This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD:
And I'm Bob Garfield. Free TV has never been exactly free. Viewers have always paid for their programming by sitting through the commercials, at least until recently, when TiVos and other digital devices have made it easier to skip past ads altogether. Thus, in the last seven or eight years, advertisers have insinuated themselves more and more into the content itself.

This week saw the first annual so-called Branded Entertainment Awards, awards built around TV shows and films so saturated with consumer products as to be positively un-TiVo-able.

Emily Nussbaum wrote about this collision of ads and art for this weekend’s New York Magazine. She says that once product placement was clumsy, laughable, tacky and sad. Most viewers saw it from a mile away. But now the products are not so much placed as thoroughly integrated, and what’s worse, they're turning up on her favorite shows.

EMILY NUSSBAUM:
That doesn't mean that that scene doesn't go beautifully well and doesn't completely match the plot. But it does remove the possibility of the writers taking different turns in the future, for instance, saying negative things about the brand.
BOB GARFIELD:
You’re not the only one concerned about this. The FCC is at least considering the idea of forcing networks to run disclaimers that say, you know, this is not a TV show, it’s a program-length commercial.
EMILY NUSSBAUM:
That's right. The proposal has come from the Writers Guild. Essentially, what they're suggesting is something that probably will strike many TV viewers as really sort of shocking and outrageous. If there’s a product integration on the show, they want a banner to run concurrently with those lines underneath the show, saying basically, this scene brought to you by Snapple.

One thing they're concerned about is that television writers not be forced by networks to become copywriters and add references to products in their stories if they don't want to. They were also concerned that writers get paid for it, if there’s extra money coming in having to do with brands. So [LAUGHS] it’s basically if you’re going to do it, we want money for it.
BOB GARFIELD:
[LAUGHS] This is an outrage! And, by the way, the money is terrible.
EMILY NUSSBAUM:
At the same time, I mean, I'm sympathetic with the WGA’s desire on both those parts.

BOB GARFIELD:
Can you give me some examples of some of the more Byzantine efforts to get the brand name before the viewer’s face?
EMILY NUSSBAUM:
Thirty Rock is a fantastically written show. I think it’s brilliant television and it’s a show about television, which makes it all the more complicated. One of the things I talked about in the piece was the efforts on the part of the brand SoyJoy to place their brand in 30 Rock, which they successfully did.
[CLIP]:
[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
TINA FEY AS LIZ LEMON:
What’s going on with you?
SCOTT ASDIT AS PETER HORNBERGER:
The season finale of MILF Island -
TINA FEY AS LIZ LEMON:
Oh!
SCOTT ASDIT AS PETER HORNBERGER:
- and I'm going to watch alone in my office.
TINA FEY AS LIZ LEMON:
That’s pretty grim, Pete.
SCOTT ASDID AS PETER HORNBERGER:
Ooh! A dangler! Liz, I'm going to get free food!
TINA FEY AS LIZ LEMON:
Wow!
PETE:
It’s SoyJoy. Who doesn't love SoyJoy?
[CRASHING SOUND]
I'm stuck!
[END CLIP]
EMILY NUSSBAUM:
And 30 Rock was about a fictional reality show called MILF Island, but there was a subplot, when one of the characters got his arm caught in a snack machine and essentially he was reaching for a SoyJoy.

And I have to say, as a regular viewer of 30 Rock, I watched this and I thought, SoyJoy [LAUGHS], what a funny name. I assumed it was a made-up product. They often have made-up products on the show. And during the scene they ran this slogan for SoyJoy.
[CLIP]:
[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
MAN:
Stay tuned for one final shocking twist, brought to you by SoyJoy, fortified with optimism.
[END CLIP]
EMILY NUSSBAUM:
I was watching a product placement within a show about a show, MILF Island [BOB LAUGHING[] that was a reality show that had a product that was a sponsor on the show. One of the things that is - when people talk about product integration is they often talk about reality television. Reality television is stuffed from top to bottom with product placement. Right from the beginning the kids on the Real World would go, hey, I've got a text message on my T-Mobile, you know. It was right there. That does not bother me.

What bothers me is the larger repercussions of that, because reality television is such a great economic bargain for TV networks that it’s easy to get a lot of sponsors to sponsor them because they can show their products right up there, and on top of that, they're very cheap to make. This has really put the squeeze on scripted shows to integrate products.
BOB GARFIELD:
Well, a perfect example is in 30 Rock where they did a joke – I guess they can only do this joke once – but it’s, as you describe it, hilarious and brilliant and ironic and subversive. Can you tell me about the Verizon placement?
EMILY NUSSBAUM:
Tina Fey - the character she’s playing, Liz Lemon, is meeting with her boss. She’s trying to pry into his personal life.
[CLIP]:
TINA FEY AS LIZ LEMON:
Are you all right?
ALEC BALDWIN AS JACK:
Well, last night I – never mind. These Verizon wireless phones are just so popular, I accidentally grabbed one belonging to an acquaintance.
TINA FEY AS LIZ LEMON:
Well sure, ‘cause that Verizon Wireless service is just unbeatable. I mean, if I saw a phone like that on TV, I would be like, where is my nearest retailer so I can get one? Can we have our money now?
[END CLIP]
EMILY NUSSBAUM:
I loved that joke. I really did think it was funny. But it’s only over time that I've started having this real sinking feeling about it, because it’s potentially the ruination of television. Call me a naive, goofy hippie, but I feel like as a viewer you almost have to make a choice about being completely gullible and credulous or being utterly suspicious.
BOB GARFIELD:
Some TV comedy is so sort of postmodern and so thick with cultural references. You know, I'm thinking of actually Seinfeld and episodes about Junior Mints and eating Snickers bars with a knife and fork. But, you know, I don't believe they were product placements and yet they were bizarrely product-centric. No money changed hands.
EMILY NUSSBAUM:
You're right. It wasn't the same economic situation. And there are other shows that did this with incredible skill, like Sex in the City, where the characters themselves were such rabid consumers that it made complete sense.

The contemporary way of doing this is to do it in a way that’s both overt and satirical, as on 30 Rock and as with Stephen Colbert, who does jokes about product integration with Doritos while being paid by Doritos.
[CLIP]:
STEPHEN COLBERT:
Cannibalism!
[LAUGHTER]
It might actually be the future.
[LAUGHTER]
If so, I am proud to announce that my 2012 presidential coverage will be sponsored by sour cream and man-flavored Doritos.
[LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE]
Put some man in your mouth!
[END CLIP]
EMILY NUSSBAUM:
I'm of two minds about this because these are, again, some of my favorite television creators. However, it sedates people and makes it feel okay, because if you feel like you’re in the joke it feels like there’s nothing wrong with it.

And, you know, maybe that’s true of the Verizon joke and of the Doritos joke, but I'm not sure that it’s true of the next ten jokes.

BOB GARFIELD:
You have something particular in mind when you say what the next step could be, because we've actually seen it foreshadowed on 30 Rock.
EMILY NUSSBAUM:
Well, I remember the first time that I was watching these because, like many people, I don't tend to watch ads on television; I TiVo through them. But, of course, if you’re TiVoing through and then you see the characters from the show, you think the show has started again.

Well, I've stopped my TiVo and I realized, of course, that it wasn't 30 Rock. It was an ad for American Express, featuring characters from 30 Rock. And the goal is to get viewers to do exactly what I did, which is to stop TiVoing through the ads.

It’s an extremely clever technique. I applaud advertisers for doing it. At the same time, I think it’s terrible. And I actually would like to point out we're talking about television, and I think television is, in many ways, the most important thing to talk about with this because it’s a big mass art form. It’s at a really crucial jumping-off point right now, economically and artistically.

But it’s not the only art form that uses product integration. There are theater shows on Broadway that feature product integration. I mentioned one in the piece - Sweet Charity changed one of their lyrics and served a certain kind of rum in the lobby in order to match this. There was a book written by the British writer Fay Weldon that was sponsored by Bvlgari.

And I think when people think about the ethics of this, which are definitely complex, and I'm not saying are as simple as saying, like, this is bad, this is corrupted, but I think people should actually compare it to other forms and think to themselves, if I knew that every time that Ian McEwan’s characters drank a Coke it was because Coca-Cola had paid him an enormous amount of money, how would that affect my thoughts about the book?

I think it’s useful for people to make these comparisons because I think that otherwise we essentially just let it happen without ever thinking about it. And I think that that’s the most dangerous thing.

BOB GARFIELD:
Well, Emily, thank you very much.
EMILY NUSSBAUM:
Thank you.
BOB GARFIELD:
Emily Nussbaum is an editor-at-large for New York Magazine. Her piece, What Would Tina Fey Do for a SoyJoy? is in the October 13th issue of the magazine.