Crouching audiences, hidden products - Part III

My article as appeared in the Advertising express magazine of February 2010...... continued from part II

The Audience Intolerance Threshold Quadrangle

The above discussion sufficiently makes it clear that when over used, Product placements in TV and Cinema can backfire and be counter productive. In this angle the concept of Audience Intolerance Threshold Quadrangle needs to be visited.

The Audience Intolerance Threshold Quadrangle is an after effect of four elements....

Prominence

Too much of importance to one or two products in a programme

Parade

Clumsy lining up of many products, with no editorial justification

Patter

Long-winded sales talk done by hero & heroine of TV programme, as if it is part of the story..

Partnership

The unholy relation between the media, advertiser, his agencies and the producer of the programme ignoring the TG


These four elements of the Audience intolerance threshold quadrangle need to be analyzed in the changed conditions and the better audiences that watch TV and cinema as compared to the past. Marketers need to understand the reason why not all communication (ads and product placements including) do not work with the market place.

Marketers have to get more realistic about the common sense of the average TV viewer /movie-goer and analyze the four factors before finalizing on a product placement deal next. The audience who grabs the remote on a commercial break cannot be made intolerant by showing long advertisements that pretend to be part of the show/movie which in any case will compromise the artistic quality of the show/movie.

Marketers have to bear the Separation principle, where it is a must to maintain appropriate separation between the programme and the advertising content. How appropriate is appropriate, is a question that marketers have to ask themselves before adventuring with a parade of products and brands, to glare from the story with prominence, to bore the people with patter and to reveal the unholy partnership to the angry target audience. People in countries like ours will not understand that this is a method of revenue generation for the producer of the film and hence tolerate it.

Greedy marketers will have to take care of the prominence part, the brand staying on in the show/movie and irritating the viewer. It is better to pass off and be remembered than remain there and not to be seen at all. Greedy channels will have to avoid parading, (the naked display of brands in an easy route to make money) to avoid people switching off the show and going to other channels. Greedy script writers will have to rethink, next time they pen dialogues that starts and ends with brand names, an easy recipe to disaster. And the greedy who is who in the marketing world- the advertiser, the ad agency, the product placement agency, the TV channel/cinema producer-director-script writer, the sponsors- each one will have to think how fair it is to over do this?

How long will this last?

How much over cooking can you do?

When TV programmes go abroad this ends up in even bigger troubles. For instance the UK media regulation authority Ofcom came heavily on Sony TV and its Indian Idol programme for blatant use of “LG KP199 mobile phone” and its virtues which violated the rules there.(This was when the programme was shown in UK for the people of Indian origin who lives there)

Guidelines for making it better

1. Distinguish between serious involvement and low involvement, whether in TV or in cinema and treat them suitably. Avoid serious programmes.

2. Product integration should be the aim, not some how product insertion which will look artificial.

3. Do not treat product placements as an opportunity to advertise alcohol and cigarettes in surrogate.

4. Use it only when editorially justifiable and to enhance practicality.

5. Try being in the back ground-Remember, passive placements with a trigger, scores more than others.

6. Bring in regulation- self is better, and ASCI can also form guidelines, at the earliest.

7. Measuring the effectiveness of product placements should be more seriously dealt with and care should be taken to make it believable.

8. Be innovative- Like Maruthi Swift which introduced the car for the first time in the film “Bunty aur Bubbly”

9. Be target specific… If you are selling women’s wear ,insert your brand and its message in a “Balika badhu” and not in “the buck stops here”.

10. Look for noticeability . It doesn’t help you being in the parade.


Summary

Product placements are a wonderful opportunity to reach the target audience, who are captive, without transferring to them a feeling of ‘being sold’. Since it is a best tool for passive learning, it can work wonders as seen in this article. It requires co ordination of all the parties involved, proper planning, and a realistic and long term approach to reap the benefits without throwing the audience into intolerance. The rule is simple- reaching more eyeballs and /or staying more time in those eyeballs need not mean more sales.

It is the proverbial golden goose, this whole business of product placements in the content, but greed should not kill it like the one in fables.

Alvida Patidev !

They're doing a new show: Celebrity Corpse, where you dig up someone after five years and try to guess who they were. -- Paul Merton [on the epidemic of tv celebrity shows]


The channel office looked like a disco on a Sunday morning….

Quite a mayhem which was the left over of the brain storming that was going on… the program team, the marketing team, the strategy people and who not… they stormed and stormed and what was left was misery and miserable looking faces….

Now what do we do? …. said the program head…. All the internal concepts seem to be non starters….

Rakhi is married off and now they are parading Rahul Mahajan as the groom… said some one.. Disgusting….

Jealousy was the raison d'être behind the whole discussion at the main meeting room of Channel U that day… all other entertainment channels were scoring well with the Such Ka Samna’s, Dus ka Dum’s and the Swayamvar’s…

I thought the Rakhi drama will bomb.. Who in the world would have thought that people will sit and watch and even adapt to this bizarre concept..? HUH… Rakhi and Marriage.. What a contradiction…?

3.5 TVR to 6.3 TVR the final day.. said some one with anguish and derision …. Our viewers also… sab ke sab budhu hai….

I had thought that the Star guys have gone bonkers …said the programme head as if in revelation… Rakhi would be the last one any sensible guy would want to marry…
But see what happened?

People laughed …… the Marketing guy quoted from Einstein… “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality”

We should think in that angle.. Something so vague and shocking…? Far from reality?

May be we should take a list of all controversy kids… and…said the Marketing head..

And… disrupted some one … marry them off???????…

What are we ..? …..A TV channel or a matrimony agency… ?

Choot bole Kawwa kate… said some one.. Why not we do the other side of sach ka samna…

Ridiculous… thundered a director… cant we have something original? I cannot believe that we have only copy paste ideas …

By the way sir.. came a rejoinder … none of this programmes are original… they all have parentage in the west…

Then scan the west… said some one.. What is left..?

Ohhh that is like plenty… but what do we want? Controversy? Or TVR with controversy? .. or just to redefine the reality TV genre and create a grand daddy of Reality TV like Allen Funt's Candid Camera..?

Now that was like the real issue… FINALLY !!!

A long minute of silence…

Think about this……. finally said the programme head… I don’t claim this to be true but this is what I think of it.. the success of reality television is due to its ability to provide humiliation……

Question marks bloomed in faces across the room…..

I know….. I know ….said the guy .... what I said was that the general viewer have a desire to see others humiliated and we will provide it in plenty…..

A Shame show…? Humiliation TV? …………Said some one quite unconvincedly

Ahem… the task is tough but we want something or else we shall be dumped into oblivion…

And we don’t want Bakra , we don’t want KBC or Indian Idol, no no to Sa Re Ga Ma, and never a laughter challenge or a boogie woogie…

Idea… shouted some one….

Why don’t we have a “Dump your Husbands” show… said the guy standing up…. We will call it Al vida pati dev!!! It will be a shock for the viewer… a shame for the abandoned and a lot of money for the channel and the sponser…

Silence rained ….

For sure it will create controversy…chat shows will feature it… MP’s will discuss it, moral police will attack it, but people will see it…..

No one clapped for they knew it was not what they want probably…

No one said a NO for they knew that MAY BE this is an IDEA that can redefine the reality TV genre,,,,,

Tailpiece: There used to be a time when you would come home, and reality was so crappy, you would turn on TV to watch stuff that people had made up, so that you could escape from the crappy reality. Now, you go out and deal with d**kheads and morons all day, and you come home and go, 'I just want to go home so I can watch d**kheads and morons on TV.'…

---Patton Oswalt

Fool the couch potato...

TV Newsreader: "Hundreds are feared missing or dead in Florida following landslides and floods caused by torrential rains."
Couch potato: "Serves 'em right. What do they wanna go around following landslides and floods for anyway...??!"

It is about disconnect and the TV viewer is like switched off.. its oft debated as to why and what and all the reasons including media fragmentation to product placements( the heights of it can be seen in TV) is debated everywhere. Here is a TV channel whose specific serial -Kis Desh Mein Hai Meraa Dil (KDMHMD) which once was popular was seeing some dips in the TRP's and hence the channel resorted to the time tested atrocity of killing a lead charecter and come out with new paper ads across the hindi belt paying obituary to the departed soul and thus keep the rating high...

While any rating above 3 is seen as kinda good by industry norms, the show has seen a dip in its viewership in the last month. As per TAM ratings (C&S, 4+ HSM), in August the show had a TVR of more than 4, which dipped to 3.6 in September and that is an official version....

The media ,print here, is hopeful and praying that this become a pattern and their bags will cling...
So what next ? Rape the heroine and launch and ad to hunt down the culprit?

Come on guys... you call it path breaking ?

The discredit goes to :-
Client: STAR Plus

Advert title(s): Obituary

Creative Agency (Name, City, Country): Purple Focus, Mumbai, India

Work type: Client work

Published: Yes

Date of publication / release: October, 2008