Fairly Symmetrical

Every so often Penny Arcade is brilliant:

Let's say you want to advertise your candy - or "lolly" - on the radio and television. You could pay a set amount of money for access to thirty-second or minute slot. Or, and here's an idea, you can make a song by a "band" whose name is the product you're trying to sell, and get it into rotation on stations and have them play it for you… The production of Pop Hits being a largely mechanical enterprise, it will not be difficult to suitably emulate the music of the moment. I don't know what the going rate is for payola, but my hunch tells me it compares favorably with actual ad spots. Customers can then go out and purchase your advertising, and they will, because they're fucking retards.

The PA post was, of course, set off by EA's double deal with McDonald's and Intel for product placement in The Sims Online. I have to say I find the EA/McDonald's/Intel deal amusing -- I can't for one minute imagine that anyone will go out and buy an Intel-based computer because they saw their Sims playing a game on it; nor can I imagine someone choosing the Golden Arches over Burger King because their online Sim makes their simoleans selling fries. This isn't any different from standard product placement in a movie or television show.

The Starburst issue, on the other hand, is more interesting.

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Commercials have been moving towards being actual content for some time -- many television commercials have decent plots, good acting, and special effects. Some even have serialized plots that run the entire length of the ad campaign. They have their own awards ceremonies and TV specials. And in some very specialized places, commercials actually are the content, as on the Home Shopping Network (except sometimes here in St. Louis, when the HSN actually shows content, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Enterprise).

In general, the walls separating content from commercial have been fairly well maintained. However, it's not hard to imagine a world where they've crumbled completely. In some ways such a world would be an improvement -- imagine shows running continuously for the entire half hour or hour, rather than 5-minute breaks per 10 minutes of content. The commercials which previously broke up the content would have been incorporated into the show -- the protagonist of the sitcom spends 45 seconds riffing on the virtues of the new car he bought (prominently mentioning its model and how much he paid for it), or an episode of Law and Order revolves around the violent theft of an expensive purse, all the while subtly pointing up the high-class qualities of its (former) owner, the elegance of the bag and of her life. Essentially, instead of merely placing products in places in the script which fit the use of that product, the script is written towards advertising a certain predetermined set of products. Of course, integrated commercials might make it somewhat more difficult to find a good time to get another soda or go to the bathroom, but PVRs should largely solve that problem. Speaking of PVRs, integrated commercials would be a relatively simple way to defeat commercial-skipping technology. If the show is the commercials, they're impossible to skip, whatever technology you have, at least until we have computers and AIs sophisticated enough to actually rewrite, re-act, and re-show the program in real time (at which point why would you bother with broadcast television?).

There are some drawbacks to integrated commercials, some obvious ones. The first is that individual stations will no longer be able to cut their own deals with product manufacturers; instead, the producers of the shows will do so. This means that television broadcasters, who have traditionally relied on ad revenues to survive, will have to figure something out fairly quickly. (They could simply continue the status quo, selling commercial time between content segments, but they would be at a severe competetive disadvantage due to PVRs and whatnot, making this difficult at best.) More than likely this is where I see commercial, free, broadcast television dying. Cable, on the other hand, especially channels like HBO, Discovery, TLC, etc, which already own their own shows, will hardly change at all. They're already subscriber-supported, and their ad revenues shouldn't change either. Broadcast television will become either a state-supported enterprise or a public supported one (same difference), similar to the way NPR has taken over public radio (and with similar results as far as audience numbers go).