Media Blog #4

I enjoy watching Stephen Colbert most days because it gives me a chance to relax. I usually just watch his monologues because I don't have time to watch his whole hour long show. Earlier this week I was bored and decided to watch one of his shorts where he did a piece of product placement (Madison and Vine). It was pretty blatant and I thought I would use this as an opportunity to talk about product placement in general and my view on it.

The whole first part of this bit was product placement for the company making allergy relief medicine, Xyzal. We see this from that he created a bit in his show based around the product Xyzal for the purpose of promoting the product Xyzal in exchange for money. To be fair, he admits to this for comedic effect, but the bottom line is that the product is promoted for money, making it product placement.

In this particular instance, the brand Xyzal is using the show Late Night With Stephen Colbert to create a certain kind of response when people hear the word Xyzal. Admittedly, I personally still think of the word Xyzal as the sound Golem from Lord of the Rings would make, but I have to admit that the word does on a subconscious level mean something positive and somewhat amusing, exactly the thing that the company is going for. More likely than not, they have found their target market to be a younger, liberal leaning audience that is likely to be watching Stephen Colbert; and the company decided to capitalize on that.

I find it interesting how Xyzal did their product placement because it was a bit out of the ordinary. Most instances of product placement are where a product is integrated in the plot, but in a way that is only discernible with conscious effort. This was about as in your face as it could possibly be, but because of the nature of the show they were airing this product placement on, they could spin it as comedy so that the viewer would accept it instead of rejecting it outright. To put it in other words, they pushed the product so hard and in your face that it was funny and because it aired on a comedy show, it passed as entertainment more so than advertising. They found a way to push their product so deep down our throats and still have it flow with the show, something I haven't seen before.

While I do have to tip my hat that I may or may not be wearing in the general direction of the company Xyzal whether it has concrete assets of its own or not, I also want to say that companies should refrain from doing this in the future. I like my comedy shows and despite the fact that they are far from pure, I would like to be able to imagine that they are and that they are pure, and untouched by and outside influence that gets between me and my laughs. I don't want to be influenced, I want my thoughts to be of my own, I don't want to feel like I'm playing into the hands of anybody else, least of all people who want to sell me stuff.

Even if it is a fallacy, I feel that it is entirely accurate and proven by events of the past. Advertising is a slippery slope. It has been proven through recent history that once people start putting up ads, if they stop, they become irrelevant and replaced by other companies with more ads and better ads. As airtime becomes more crowded, advertisers will resort to using new methods to get their product out until ads are everywhere and we have places like Times Square with flashing billboards for Coke and Pepsi, Apple, and Microsoft, brands we no longer can escape from as they slowly creep into every aspect of our lives.

In conclusion, I just want to say that if we want to stop this, we as consumers have a duty to try and spot things like product placement out, and not to fall for the subliminal messages and associations that are being thrown at you through that product placement. We need to consciously filter out of our brains the things companies and advertisers want to make subliminal in order to show companies that their advertisements are a waste of money, that we won't listen when it gets in the way of our TV shows and movies. We need to make product placement irrelevant and unworkable for companies if we want our content back to ourselves.