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| Photo: The Talk |
Product placements provide a steady income stream by driving product sales. Retailers benefit by reaching a wider audience, and television networks rely heavily on advertising revenue to pay for the production of their shows, which is why we are subjected to TV commercials.
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| Photo: GMA |
Nowadays television hosts including news readers, meteorologists, and medical doctors regularly join product promotors in the demonstrations of 5 or 6 products claimed to be offered at a discount during the show.
If viewers buy the featured products the talk shows get commissions (a cut of each sale) or affiliate sales revenue for driving viewers to buy the products.
Yet, I'll confess, I'm getting tired of them. It's beginning to feel like the home shopping network is taking over talk shows and we're watching infomercials disguised as program segments. The featured products are fairly random from skincare to cooking or exercise equipment and clothing. Usually, we're given 24 hours to go to a specially set up website for the network (which tracks the sales) to grab a deal.
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| Photo: The Today Show |
And lastly, is the line between journalists and promotors on GMA, CBS Mornings, and The Today Show getting blurred? Is replacing genuine content with selling commodities ruining talk and morning news shows? Certainly, a show's attempts to make money must be balanced by offering viewers substance of value.
Advertising has traditionally provided support for broadcasts, and- by the way- now increasingly for podcasts (less "broad" than broadcasts, but effectively the center of media reaching out to grab your attention). The advertising takes on a different visage- no more "Now we are going for a commercial break...stay tuned"- but the economics are very much the same as they've been for decades.
ReplyDeleteGoing back to TV's glory days when I was growing up, I would stop watching shows with obnoxious adverts. These days, I make it a point to carefully screen adverts/ similar for any brand when I am considering a purchase. Effectively, this results in a bifurcation- high end (adverts, if any, done w styles that I like) and low end (no adverts).
Thanks for sharing Barry. When there were few product segments on talk shows, I thought they were kind of fun, but now that every talk shows does them on every episode I tend to leave the room during them to get a task done. Too much of what began as watchable segments. I'm sure the time of the year has to do with their frequency.
DeleteAs you are noting- this time of year is when such things are noticeable (and in both our cases, "irritating" or similar). The NY Times had a posting on this: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/14/opinion/wicked-marketing-collaboration-culture.html
ReplyDeleteThe author of the article, an opinion piece about "Marketing Collaborations" (exactly the subject of your excellent blog post), is a prof at Fashion Institute of Technology so presumably knows her way around on such things.