IP Democracy: Sponsored Entertainment: Not So Bad, Really

The New York Times’ Stuart Elliott has this piece today about the rise of branded entertainment or sponsored videos — where advertisers pay for the creation of content. While at first blush programming pumped through with product placements sounds hideous, in actuality sponsors are helping film makers and maybe even audiences.

As Elliott points out, sponsored programming was the norm during the “Golden Age” of television. What he doesn’t mention is that some of the best TV programming ever made, still widely praised by critics and enshrined at the AFI, The Museum of Broadcasting and other collections, came from the Goodyear TV Playhouse, The Philco Television Playhouse and The Alcoa Hour. Many of these shows, adapted from top-tier Broadway plays and award-winning short stores, often contained blatant product placements.

Today, Krups is sponsoring Espresso Shorts, a series of web-based videos made by NYU film students that have as their main purpose, of course, to sell espresso makers. But, the young actor-director who won a Krups contest among the budding film makers is happy to have produced a commercialized film.

Mr. Lee [Young H.-Lee, the winner] said he was pleased that Krups was helping further his plans for a film career and was not bothered by a stipulation that the “Espresso Shorts” include as part of their plots a Krups espresso machine. In “Espresso Ninjas,” the desire to possess the Krups appliance sets off battles among ninjas who for some reason live in Manhattan. “It’s a cutthroat business,” Mr. Lee said of filmmaking. “You need all the help you can get.”

In any event, bad product pitches or bad sponsored programming won’t cut the mustard.

The pitfall of branded entertainment is the inability of many advertisers to understand the difference between deftly weaving a product into a plot line and ham-handedly pushing it to the point that they annoy or alienate consumers. For example, when critics reviewed “Bye Bye Love,” a 1995 movie about divorced parents, they focused as much on the prominent role played by McDonald’s restaurants as on the performances of the cast.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on September 1, 2006 10:54 AM to IP Democracy