Searching For Inspiration
Wednesday, June 23rd, 2004Does the increasingly high level of pervasive product placement in movies annoy anyone else these days? I haven’t gone off on a rant in awhile. I think I’m well overdue. It seems that the very industry (advertising) that defines us as a capitalistic consumer culture is being eaten alive by our own vices. We don’t like ads during our daytime soaps or primetime TV. So we invent Tivo. Not forgetting that those ads pay Jennifer Aniston’s ridiculous salary in the first place. I mean originally, no one even knew how to invent Tivo, it was just an idea, so they took it to a place like Ideo. They sat down with a team of engineers, psychologists, and economists and said…TV defines America as we know it, lets change that. And so they did.
Tivo’s hit The Tipping Point. It’s past early adoption and taking the mass market by storm. Tivo is being hailed as the savior in television content in America. But at what price?
The ad industry is tanking. Creative professionals are loosing their ability to offer value in a TV media setting. Tivo literally just bought up the rest of the proverbial real estate. Thus, the industry is forced to move to new methods of marketing. Tying Mini Coopers to the tops of Ford Expeditions, offering an iPod connection to a BMW. I love these ideas, they are the ingenious ideas that once went into ingenious copy and ingenious layouts.
But, I do think one of the most distrubing marketing trends is the incredible amount of product placement going on in movies currently. Not only are we bombarded with vastly shameless promotion of predominantly bad movies before they come out. Entire awards shows *cough* MTV movie awards *cough* are gigantic billboards for the upcoming movies of the summer. Then once the movies do release, we go to them, and are bombarded with more shameless promotion of products.
I hit “Dodgeball” the other day. Funny movie. Kind of. What I remember more than the humor is: vitamin water, marriott hotels, lance armstrong (nike had some sort of vicarious hand in that one), and many others. It seemed as though the entire movie was built around product showcases. We are tricked into the theatre during the summer months for a good laugh. Have no fear, the laugh was provided. But, it’s becoming increasingly hard to sit down and enjoy the actual content of the movie anymore. You see this all over television now too. Product placement, giveaways, pimped out rides. Nothing is about the content anymore, it’s about how to tap into America’s attention deficit disorder. Too much media all the time. Isn’t the content what Tivo is after?
I just seems sort of the epitomy of the hypocrisy of American culture. We drive consumerism with our rabid intent of buying buying buying all the time, yet we are tired of companies trying to prevasively cram into our eyeballs exactly what is good for us. Thus killing an entire industry in one fell swoop. Advertising as we know it is dead. It’s a sad death in some ways if you ask me. It’s hard for anyone to miss being bombarded with ads daily, in the car on the drive home, on the TV when you get home, all over the paper that we read. Companies are starting to realize, the death of advertising = revenue. We aren’t your customers anymore, we simply don’t pay attention long enough, there’s too much media coming at us.
Rising from the ashes, or soon to be ashes, is something that I hope takes shape quickly and fruitfully. Great products. In a market full of consumers as rigid as us laptop wielding, internet bargaining, uber-consumers, we need to see more rock solid products. Products that are so good they market themselves. Products that take what someone else has done, but make it better in a whole new way. I challenge every business out there to look at what they offer. What do people hate about it? What makes it great? How can you eliminate the bad, add to the good, then make it even better? Truly wonderful product is the way of the future. Wonderfully simple products that just wonderfully work. I challenge you to take your product or service to another level. Create a better life for your customer by making your product solve the everyday problems that they face as an American in your market. After you make their life easier, do it again, show them you really do care. Too high of a challenge? Call me, I’ll brainstorm with you.
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