Networks Tell FCC: Don't Regulate Product Placements

Variety:

The MPAA, the parent companies of the Big Four nets and other biz heavyweights have told the Federal Communications Commission that there's no need for new disclosure rules regarding product placement on the smallscreen.

In a joint filing responding to a recent FCC request for public comments on the issue, 18 major media concerns argued that existing disclosure requirements, which have been in place for decades, are sufficient and well established. The group's filing asserted that product placement has a long history in TV and that, if anything, more product placement is needed to allow nets to offset declining profit margins.

Read the whole story: Variety

Comments

[lynninny]

I remember seeing the specific episode of Rescue Me pictured above, where the guys were playing street hockey, and thinking, good grief, they are over the top with the Vitamin Water pitch...seriously, they waved around bottles of it, said the name Vitamin Water, and various characters drank at least four different bottles of it. I remember thinking, I didn't know tough-guy firemen (i.e., Dennis Leary) who play street hockey drink berry Vitamin Water! LOL.

[buckbuck11]

God, I remember the days when brand names and trademarks had to be blackened out, or given faux "Brand X" names...

Geez, I'm old......

I also remember when there was such a thing as fairness in the broadcast media.

....I'm a fossil!

[Stretchumall]

Well! I say we let them use product placement in return for Ad (comercials)time.
I would love to see them try and place some preperation H, or better yet maxi pads.


Stretchumall

[Chaparral]

I listened to a segment on radio this week about this very topic. Screen writers are not happy about being forced to write in product placement lines in their scripts; actors, likewise, don't like having their craft reduced to being shills for business. IMO product placement has no business in programming. Think of it this way: would you read a novel where the characters are advertising products in the dialogue? I think not.

[deeppeace]

Of course you read books with products in them. It's just that no one has thought to exchange money for the placements - yet.

Screenwriters don't want anyone telling them what to do. I lost any sympathy for them when they struck ten years ago and caused this infernal morass of "reality" (unscripted - haha) television.

[SlithyTove]

Actually, if you read the original Ian Fleming 007 novels, you would see a fair bit of this (Rothmans, Dunhill, Walther, Aston Martin, and plenty of other products aimed at the metrosexual Bond wannabe)...but then Fleming did not get paid for shilling (a sterling pun, if I say so myself) them. Nor on the other hand was he ever likely to be mistaken for a great British writer like Joseph Conrad or Virginia Woolf or James Joyce or even Kazuo Ishiguro or VS Naipaul.

However, the MPAA and RIAA are a bunch of litigious thugs who would sell their grandmothers for a dime and sue yours on principle while lobbying for a permanent antitrust exemption for themselves -- even as they screw over the original artists who produced the content they guard so zealously. Wake up and smell the coffee, fat cats...margins are shrinking in your cushy world. Deal with it.

[brenner21]

It's almost as if corporations dictate their own rules to regulatory agencies ...

[Just2stressed]

Watch this video and forward to friends. "No Way, No John McCain".


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-R5Vh5tOWk&feature=related

[11907281]

Television still exists? I would be interested to find out the average production cost of a TV show before these abortions known as reality TV took over and after. No real writers to pay, no real talent to pay except the winner, and even then, sometimes the prize is partly a product placement anyway. Let TV crash and burn, the net is king.

[GetoffMylawn]

This is where I think the gov should get the hell out of business. If TV producers make deals to place products in shows, fine. If TV views don't like it, they they should complain and turn the channel. Free enterprise should be free.
What the FCC should do is make sure huge corporations don't get too big and too powerful. This puts a clamp on free speech.
There needs to be a balance, and product placement is an issue that should be market driven.

[Sammy00400]

Yes there needs to be a balance. However the idea of 'market driven' is extremely unpopular right now and should not be the basis of an argument. Those that do will probably lose.

[sueno]

These are some of the reasons TV suxs-
everything is about them making money, not producing good programming.
The web is cleaning their clocks because their out of touch-