[boondoggle16]

This, more rules for thee but not for me.

Pepsi can pay $10MM for the main character in a kid's movie to drink a Pepsi.

But if a small board game company sends an influencer a free board game, an influencer is not allowed to review it.

Personally, I think having "background" props is much more insidious. At least with social media I know I can expect grift. Seeing someone drink Pepsi in a movie is more like seeing your friend drink Pepsi.

John likes Pepsi, and he's cool. Think I'll drink some.

[Vecr]

I'm pretty sure the "influencer" is allowed to review it, it just needs to be clearly disclosed. I'm not sure what would be actually prohibited.

[chomp]

It’s specifically endorsement they care about. Reviewing can be an endorsement if you say what you liked about the product. A critique wouldn’t need an ad placement.

If you watch e.g. Masterchef, they are very coy with how they phrase their product placements. They don’t endorse, they say something like “X contestant will have no problem getting up to temp on their stove” as the camera pans over the logo. They don’t spend longer than maybe 3 seconds featuring it. As far as I can tell, TV and movies play by the same rules, they just know what boundaries to not cross.

[HWR_14]

No, they endorse the products by doing that. And include the required disclosure in the credits.

[setr]

I doubt product placement falls under the same rules as endorsement, because there's no actual claims about the product, or preference towards it. They're just showing the object in use/place.

Even if a character states "monster is their favorite drink" that wouldn't constitute an endorsement, because it's simply the mark of a fictional character.

But influencers/actors/etc saying "monster is their favorite" is an altogether different thing, because a viewer would assume that's actually their opinion being stated -- that it's being endorsed "in fairness". [0]

The fundamental problem is deception, and product placement isn't deceptive (it's just hoping you see it enough you'll think it's "common"), but paid endorsements definitely can be.

[0] From the endorsement guide: https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/p204500_endorse...

Example 6 is about an actor who says a home fitness system is “the most effective and easy-to-use home exercise machine that I have ever tried.” One commenter asserted this would only be deceptive if the actor had not used the machine. The example is intended to illustrate why this statement is an endorsement and is not intended to address all the ways the statement could be deceptive or who could be liable for any such deception. The Commission notes, however, there are multiple ways in which the statement could be deceptive, including not representing the actor’s actual opinions or misleading consumers as to the machine’s effectiveness or ease of use.

[dragonwriter]

> But if a small board game company sends an influencer a free board game, an influencer is not allowed to review it.

Yes, they are, they aren’t allowed to fail to disclose the fact of the donation when reviewing it.

> Personally, I think having "background" props is much more insidious.

The FTC has power to deal with deceptive, not with insidious (the latter is dubious as a power of government at all under the First Amendment, but its clearly not, whether or not within the power of government broadly, not something Congress has by statute assigned to the FTC the way they have dealing with deceptive trade practices.)

[pc86]

Nobody considers a theatrical movie an unbiased review of the products the fictional characters are using.

Half the comments in here are some version of "what we can't review board games now?!?!1" when that's the opposite of the case. The problem is that "content creators" don't want to disclose what they're legally required to.

[greenthrow]

More than Pepsi; cigarettes. This is the only way tobacco is really allowed to advertise anymore. This is why you see scenes of characters enjoyint cigarettes prominently even though it does nothing to move the story forward.

[robobro]

Plenty of creative people smoke, drink, and engage in other vices. I'm not confident that any significant number of cases that people smoke in media is due to funding from big tobacco. When I would light up on stage and drink some beer during house shows, as a musician, I know I wasn't getting any funding for it. Do you have any articles about big tobacco paying authors, screenwriters, game designers, etc to include cigarettes in their content?

What about capnolagnia (smoking fetish) films and photos -- is the smut industry getting paid off by big tobacco?

[dragonwriter]

> I'm not confident that any significant number of cases that people smoke in media is due to funding from big tobacco.

I’m fairly confident that much of it is, that spending on it is systematically not properly disclosed to the FTC, and that approximately 100% of the cases outside a documentary or newd cobtext involving a recognizable brand are paid (in cash or otherwise) product placement, the last bit the same as with non-tobacco brand placement, and the rest as has been documented through 1994 by internal tobacco documents compared to FTC reports, with no sudden shift after 1994 that would indicate a behavior change.

[dragonwriter]

“newd” -> “news”, wasn’t aiming for a portmanteau of “nude” and “lewd”.

[k_roy]

Let's be fair though, that actually happening in movies has dropped dramatically. So many people I know vape now, and there is basically no way you can make vaping look cool onscreen

[dragonwriter]

> Let's be fair though, that actually happening in movies has dropped dramatically

It has dropped somewhat from the peak in 2005 to a little below the 1991 level by 2016. And we know from comparison of internal tobacco firm documents on product placement with their reports to the FTC that almost half of what the companies internally documented spending on product placement between 1978-1994 (that’s the latest the internal records that have been subject to outside examination go) were not reported to the FTC as spending on paid endorsements as required, and that that includes 100% of product placement spending in that period after 1988. [0]

And, we know that recogbizable branding is still displayed on screen and that with every other categort of goods that invariably, outside of news/documentary context, involves direct or in-kind payment for promotional purposes.

[0] https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7kd981j3

[TillE]

The only reason people think smoking "looks cool" is because of decades of aggressive advertising from cigarette companies, which seeped into the culture.

[Paul-Craft]

Decades? Try a century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torches_of_Freedom

[dccoolgai]

This is the inexorable mean to which heavy government regulation inexorably regresses: The fantasy that large evildoers will lose some of their ill-gotten gains (for the IRS, billionaires privatizing gains and socializing losses... for the FTC, Pepsi being forced to disclose product placement) faces the brick wall of lawyers and lobbyists. So they aim at "softer targets": hassling middle class tax payers and businesses who don't have those lawyers and lobbyists.

[eropple]

Middle-class taxpayers doing payola marketing for very large companies to poison the well towards other middle-class taxpayers, yes.

Nobody thinks a movie is a representative endorsement or review. There is no such distinction for content creators.

This really isn’t hard to understand.