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Wednesday, October 10, 2001

Confronted for the first time with a staggering drop in advertising revenue, all four major broadcast television networks are contemplating sweeping changes to the face of prime-time programming. [...] Product placement, reintroduced last year in CBS' unscripted series "Survivor," will be more common and obvious. Also in vogue is sponsorship--and even ownership--of shows in which advertisers can insist on details as mundane as whether the cast of NBC's "Friends" wears Prada or Armani.

The soft ad market, caused by both the dot-com crash and the overall economic slump, is spilling over into television as well. TV seems to be headed forward into the 1950s and 1960s; it's been that long since a sponsor owned a weekly series (ownership of soap operas lasted somewhat longer). It will be interesting to see how the public reacts to this reversion to the early days. There have been relatively few shows that had only one sponsor for even a single episode, and those tend to be comparatively special events, handled differently. For example, this season's premiere of ABC's Alias was sponsored by Nokia (resulting in surprisingly noticeable use of cell phones in the show) and ran entirely without commercial interruption. These days, single-sponsor shows generally run without commercials, or with very limited commercials. It's also not clear that people will react to such things the way sponsors would like, especially if they do this with established shows. People would never refer to "Proctor and Gamble's Friends", for example. The only established show, if that's the quite right way to refer to it, with a title sponsor that people remember is the Hallmark Hall of Fame movie that appears every network sweeps period, and Hallmark up and created their own cable channel (and a perfect time they picked to do that, didn't they?).

@ 01:52 PM CST [Link]