You Can't Win 'em All

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/10/tnt-cancels-trust-me/

I have to devote one post to one of my growing favorite shows that I recently found out was canceled. Trust Me depicted life in a fictional advertising agency RGM that boasts clients including Dove Hair Care, Bertolli, and Buick. Product placement was the obvious source of funding for the show, which would feature one product as a client for an entire episode. In this sense, the show was doomed from the start. The only people that could relate to the show were people in advertising because not many people can believe that advertising is stressful and harmful to your personal life. Since advertising is depicted as a glamorous career, audiences had a hard time connecting with the characters. Also, many people have a chip on their shoulder when they think about advertisers due to beliefs of subliminal messages and false advertising. The audience who watched the show could never relate to the problems of the people who lie to them everyday. The last few episodes of Trust Me gained 1.4 million viewers, which was too low of a number for TNT to cope with. Sadly, Trust Me got the axe along with many other creatively successful shows.

Product Placement Complications

Advertisers spend millions of dollars to place their brand in highly viewed shows or movies. The common belief has been that by placing your brand in specific movies, the advertiser benefits from reaching a target audience and being "endorsed" to a certain degree by the characters or actors in the show. This clip by Martin Lindstrom from Advertising Age raises an interesting question, does product placement work? According to their study which scanned the brains of consumers when they viewed the product placements, sometimes the brands were actually deleted from the viewer's mind. Whether or not this study proves that product placement actually works is questionable. A better question may be do consumers actually receive the message, properly decode it, and then become convinced to buy the product? Or, as seen from the backlash after Transformers was released, is product placement a huge incentive for consumers not to buy the product. These are important questions that advertisers must answer before paying $26 million to be a part of the next episode of American Idol.

http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1370868150/bctid3302395001