Product Placement on TV News

I guess it was only a matter of time.  We’ve seen product placement advertising in movies for years.  You know, the prominently placed can of soda on a desk or the FedEx truck that inexplicably drives through a scene.  

Now, there is product placement on TV news.  The New York Times reports that the ethically questionable practice has begin on the newscasts at WVVU, a TV station in Las Vegas, with cups of McDonald’s iced coffee placed prominently in front of the news readers.  The ad agency behind the scheme said the coffee will be “whisked away” if KVVU happens to do a negative story about McDonald’s, like a report on some food illness.

The station says they are doing it to bolster sagging advertising revenue.  Sort of bottom-line wins over integrity, I suppose.

Here in the Washington, DC, area, we’ve heard radio news anchors on all-news WTOP seamlessly read a news story back-to-back with a commercial, using the same voice inflection, for years to the point where it’s difficult to differentiate the news story from the advertisement.  But TV news crosses the ethical line, I believe.

As Herbert Jack Rotfeld at Auburn University observed, “In the end, they just make the audiences even more skeptical of everything.”

Category: News Media