Perfect Product Placement in 10 items or less?
Last night TBS aired an interesting experiment in blatant product placement last night with the new comedy 10 items or less. The show was presented commercial free and with out interruptions. The show was supported instead by two sponsors that were shoehorned into the story in awkward ways. To TBS’s credit they were very above board and some what irreverent in the product placements. The intro of the show more or less told there would be product placements and announced the sponsors. The jar and bottle were taped to the main character’s shoulders during the announcement.
I’m still a bit torn about the effectiveness of the tactic. On the positive hand, the show sponsor idea felt a bit like the old days of TV. With the characters making product pitches, there was a feeling of continuity. It certainly couldn’t be tivoed or skipped too easily. It will work just fine if distributed online. The products were pretty omnipresent throughout the show, if only as backgrounds. Frankly, a location of a supermarket makes consumer packaged goods easy to display.
On the negative hand, the product pitches felt completely inserted into the show. Twice the characters found a sudden and extraneous need to use a product. The pitch was all about the product and only that product. It felt completely inserted.
I was also confused for a while about which brand sponsored the program. The pitches were pretty generic. The lotion segment could have been any lotion, and the same was true of the mayo. Compounding this was a lack of distinctive packaging for the brand sponsors, since the weren’t shown that close up. To me, the Vaseline for men lotion bottle closely resembles the Nivea for Men bottle. In addition, mayo jars pretty much all look identical, so Hellmann’s could have been Kraft.
The two bottles
Nivea Packaging
I tend to lean towards this as a failed experiment, but it’s still one to watch.
