Another interesting panel was “Your Favorite Video is a Commercial,” which had a lot to do with viral marketing campaigns utilizing amusing or interesting content (typically videos) that people love and share and while loving and sharing them, they do Corporate America’s bidding. Examples include Dove’s “Evolution” ad and Burger King’s Subservient Chicken website (or back to 2001 with BMW’s The Hire series).
Tommy Means, from Mekanism gave an interesting review of previous methods of marketing. He showed the infamous Winston-Flintstones ad. Did you know that Winston cigarettes used to sponsor The Flintstones? He called the KISS Army one of the first social networks (which sounds correct). He showed these funny videos that his company made for Nintendo promoting a game called Super Monkey Ball Deluxe that featured a kid inside a giant plastic ball instead of any actual game footage.
If you’re fascinated or appalled by the notion of corporate America creating content to push products or media companies allowing product integration into content, don’t think we haven’t been here before. It’s important to remember that back in the radio days, it wasn’t a matter of integrating brands into programs; in fact, it was the other way round. The ad agencies used to produce the programming on behalf of their clients and the resulting shows were on the networks. I refer you to Pat Weaver’s 1993 autobiography The Best Seat in the House: The Golden Years of Radio and Television:
When I went to NBC in 1949, the networks were no more than facilities that the big advertising agencies used to broadcast shows they created, owned and controlled. They hired the producers, the writers, and the stars, and, in effect, decided exactly what was to go on the air.
Or perhaps this from Fred Allen’s 1954 account of his time in radio, Treadmill to Oblivion:
Advertising agency executives who supervise the presentation of radio shows for their clients have to check on the writers, the weekly scripts, attend rehearsals, worry about the rating and on occasion try to cope with temperamental stars. The executive in charge of our show [Town Hall Tonight] was a neurotic specimen. He was so high-strung he could have gone to a masquerade as a tennis racquet.
Radio was the first free entertainment ever given to the public… [but it] could not survive because it was a by-product of advertising. Ability, merit and talent were not requirements of writers and actors working in the industry. Audiences had to be attracted, for advertising purposes, at any cost and by any artifice. Standards were gradually lowered.
Hmm. Sounds oddly familiar.
[And again, here's another take on the same panel.]
Tags: WebbyConnect, radio, TV, Pat Weaver, Fred Allen, advertising, Tommy Means, Mekanism
2 Responses
-
Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey Says:
Pat Weaver wrote an autobiography? I’d like to read that!
-
The Pop View Says:
This is Sylvester “Pat” Weaver, who was president of NBC. He helped move the networks away from simply carrying programming produced by the ad agencies and toward producing their own shows and then selling the ad time. He also created The Today Show and The Tonight Show.
Coincidentally, in 1935, Weaver became the producer of Fred Allen’s show Town Hall Tonight, which was sponsored by Bristol-Myers and aired on the NBC network.
You can read an online summary of the book here.