Britain Reviews Product Placement Ban, U.S. Slowly Moves in Opposite Direction

Britain's culture secretary announced last week that he plans to relax current restrictions on product placement in British television programs. Currently in Britain, commercial product placement is banned in broadcast TV shows, though products already featured in programming imported from foreign countries are not curtailed. This proposed change in policy seems to be aimed, at least in part, at remedying British commercial TV's current economic struggles.

Reactions have been mixed in the U.K. Media groups welcome the change, of course, assuming it will lead to increased revenue, but analysts question the move's ability to cure the networks' financial woes. A video posted on the BrandRepublic.com surveys roughly a dozen individuals on the street. Although some of these consumers questioned how effectively embedded advertising would induce them to buy a product, they were generally unconcerned about the distraction or overall impact of its reappearance in their programs.

In the U.S., where product placement is still very much prominent on TV, consumer groups have long been lobbying the FCC, FTC and government representatives to enact harsher restrictions on the embedding of branded products on TV. The FCC has been slowly moving forward in the last few years to enact measures such as real-time warnings when a sponsored product is featured in a show (as opposed to just placing warnings in the opening or closing credits).

Consumer groups like the CCFC (Campaign for Commercial-Free Childhood), Morality in Media and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychologists wrote a formal letter to FCC chairman Julius Genachowski last week, asking that product placement be made more transparent. In June, CCFC sent a letter to President Obama signed by more than 2,500 parents asking that he have FCC and FTC analyze the advertising policies with families' and children's well-being in mind. Meanwhile, the marketing and media-centered think tank, the Progress & Freedom Foundation, has been lobbying against such measures, insisting that the concerns do not reflect the current state of media advertising today, that broadcast media would be facing restrictions that online and other media aren't subjected to, and that any curtailing would be a violation of first amendment rights.

Nothing has been decided as of yet, but product placement has always been a common practice in the U.S. In 2007, product placement was up 13%, to 26,000 placements on network TV and 160,000 on cable. Some placements are downright egregious, such as the 2006 episode of 7th Heaven in which Oreo cookies were the focal point of the plotline, and the '06 episode of Desperate Housewives in which the GMC Yukon Denali was integrated into a subplot. With the rise in the use of DVR and TiVo among consumers, companies have had to embed their products more aggressively into storylines and supply them among the "props" on the sets of popular TV shows.

Phew. On that note, we leave you with Wayne Campbell: