[bendykstra]

The disclaimer might be new, but not the product placement. The first season of Netflix's House of Cards, which aired in 2013, had an obnoxious amount. It even made its way into the dialogue, turning one scene into a 10 second ad.

"Is that a PS Vita. What games does he have?"

"All of them."

"I have a console at home that I play to relax. I could use one of these for the car!"

http://www.criticalcommons.org/Members/dsbaldwin32/clips/hou...

[Declanomous]

Product placement just kills the pace of the show. My family watched White Collar together, and it had some really forced product placement from Ford. They have a scene where a conversation is happening in traffic, and the car beeps and then does the emergency stop thing. One character tells the other to keep his eyes on the road, and the other one responds, "It's a Ford, it can take care of itself. I'm keeping my eyes on you."

That was so forced and stupid my brother and I still quote it. It was so completely tone deaf that it pretty much cemented Ford as a company that is completely out of touch.

As time goes on, the product placement bit from Wayne's World gets more and more topical.

[usrusr]

I take comfort in the hope that product placement actually works better when it is not implemented in that despicably crude way, and that eventually both sides of the transaction will learn to stay subtle.

If the cool hero uses a motorcycle to escape the evil henchmen I don't care much wether money was involved in selecting the brand of motorcycle. If he then spends a minute of screen time lecturing about the benefits of said brand, it should be considered a new category far beyond product placement.

[groovy2shoes]

Chuck had a rather infamous product placement for Subway in the second season that worked out pretty well. The placement itself was gratuitous and over-the-top, and it drew quite a bit of criticism from the press. Yet, I thought it worked well for comedic effect in the context of the show, especially considering the character involved and the contemporary absorption of Subway's ad campaign ("five dollar footlongs") into pop culture. Sure, I rolled my eyes at it, but I also had a good laugh because it was obvious that the show was self-aware in the way they did it.

Anyway, I only bring this up because, while I agree with you in principle, I think that in the right context, exaggerated product placements can be as palatable as subtle ones.

(Later on, when the show was being considered for cancellation, a massive fan campaign had hundreds of thousands if not millions of fans getting themselves some footlongs to eat during the season finale and mailing the receipts to NBC, thus saving the show for three more seasons).

[freehunter]

I would really rather the characters use real-life brands than obviously fake nonsense brands. When someone uses a MobTel phone to call 555-555-5555 and request pizza from Little Kaisers, it seriously drags me out of the moment.

If they're using a Samsung, eh who cares. My brother has the same phone, I can relate to that.

[usrusr]

That's exactly how I came to the same conclusion, that only the disclaimer is new.

I am actually quite torn about those disclaimers: once people have officially committed to product placement, any remaining internal unwillingness to compromise writing for placement revenue will break down completely.

The opposite is just as worse by the way: our public broadcasting networks here in Germany are producing some rather popular fiction, and they have started to implement draconian rules to fight product placement (after some sizable scandals where the money went to their contractors or employees instead of going to the nominally nonprofit networks themselves). The result is that any time something like social media comes up in, say, a cop show, they have to make up a new fantasy brand to represent Facebook, Twitter or Google. This severely hampers their ability to talk about the modern world. Imagine for example what would be left of The Godfather if you replaced all references to the "brands" of Catholicism (and Christianity in general) or Italy with generic placeholders. You might as well move it from America to the Shire entirely.

The influence of product placement is there now matter how you spin it. In House of Cards (US), the worst influence might not be in who paid but in who did not: iirc Twitter seems to be pretty much embargoed in the show, even though they are using it for promotion quite a lot.

[brak1]

HoC has loads... like it had an iphone app (game) product placement. I tried to find the name of it, but found this instead:

"'House of Cards' littered with product placements | New York Post" - http://nypost.com/2015/03/02/house-of-cards-littered-with-pr...

[dagw]

like it had an iphone app (game) product placement.

Monument Valley. Although according to both parties no money changed hands. The producer simply liked the look of game, called up the developers, asked if they could use it and the developers said "sure".

[passivepinetree]

It's worth noting that Monument Valley is an excellent game, product placement or no. It's often the first thing pointed to in the whole video-games-as-art debate.

[gambiting]

Weirdly enough, I don't mind that as much as actual ads - at least I'm still watching the show.