Tomorrow, as you’re probably aware, is a big day for Apple. And a big day for Apple means a big day for people who love technology. For tomorrow is iPad release day. The secretive California-based company has, as expected, limited exposure to its newest possibly revolutionary product, with the list of non-employees who’ve handled the thing for more than a few minutes limited to Stephen Colbert at the Grammys and the regular suspects of tech reviewers, including such familiar names as Walt Mossberg and Stephen Fry.
To this illustrious group we can now add: the cast of the ABC sitcom Modern Family.
Mashable has a nice summary of what the episode entailed:
American sitcom Modern Family ran an entire episode about the iPad this week. A character’s birthday is April 3 — the same day the iPad launches — so his wife decides to try and get him an iPad.
The episode begins with an impassioned pitch. “The iPad comes out on my actual birthday. It’s like Steve Jobs and God got together to say, ‘We love you, Phil,’” he says. “It’s a movie theater, a library and a music store all rolled into one awesome pad.”
The show features an actual iPad — not a mockup, but the real thing. His wife brings the iPad home, he blows out the virtual candles in a birthday cake app and then the family gathers around and oohs and ahhs at the device.
For those who want to watch the episode, Hulu is a great way to do so.
I think it’s important to think about this from a couple different angles, which are intimately related. First, did the featuring of a product disrupt the proceedings of the show? Second, is this effective from a marketing perspective?
For the former, TV critic extraordinaire Alan Sepinwall addressed this issue directly:
And as product integration goes, this episode-long plug for the iPad was kind of icky. Yes, Phil has been established as a lover of gadgets, some more useful than others, and if the “Modern Family” writers had tried to – or been allowed to – let some of the other characters question the necessity of the iPad, even as Phil launched a passionate defense, it might have worked better. But devoting the main plot of an episode to Claire desperately trying to get Phil this awesome and super-popular gift, and then climaxing it with the entire cast standing around Phil’s new iPad and oooh’ing and aah’ing? Ick. And I say this as someone whose hand is surgically glued to his iPhone.
(See also, as Sepinwall mentions elsewhere in his review, Emily Nussbaum’s comprehensive take on product placement from last year.)
Sepinwall’s assessment seems to match the general reaction to this episode. It was gimmicky and cute, but not the strongest of the series. But note also Sepinwall’s careful use of language: he calls the Modern Family episode one which featured “product integration.” And, according to the show’s co-creator Christopher Lloyd, there was no product placement. From The Hollywood Reporter:
In fact, there was no product placement. This was widely assumed, and everybody was wrong. We wanted to do a show about Phil getting very excited about a new product and it seemed the perfect one to use, since it was debuting [April 1]. We approached Apple about getting their cooperation (using the product, for example, and they are notoriously secretive about their products prior to their being launched) and they agreed and gave us a few other small concessions. But there were no stipulations as with normal product placement, i.e. we give you X dollars and you have to feature our product such-and-such a way and say such-and-such nice things about it. We are not angels — we have made those agreements with other companies. But that was not the deal with Apple. It was all story-driven.
Does this make a difference in your mind? Even if the show wasn’t compensated in the normal way, it seems certain that Apple wouldn’t have agreed to the deal if its product were to be portrayed in a negative light. One particularly damning image occurs at the 20:30 mark of the episode, as the entirety of the modern family gathers around Phil, all basking in the glow of this new device.
I think the issue of how disruptive the product integration is turns out to be very related to our second question above: if viewers are distracted by the promotion of a product, how is product integration any different than the traditional hard-sell commercials which people now DVR right through? Those commercials, at least, had the courtesy to be honest about their intentions. Now, viewers have no advance warning for when one of their favorite shows might be “sponsored” for a week. The appeal to an industry which, as we’ve seen, is struggling to come up to solutions to the DVR problem is obvious, but product integration might not be any more of a long-term solution, especially if its used in the clumsy ways which Nussbaum outlines in the article linked to above: people are just going to be turned off from those shows which can’t figure out a way balance their financial needs and the trust of their audiences.
In my case, Modern Family is a show that I watch regularly, though usually on Hulu a day or two after the original air-date. And because I spend way too much time reading the internet, I’d already read about the show’s iPad episode before I got to judge the execution for myself. This is not the way to watch a show. In one sense, Modern Family succeeded because a whole range of marketing and media blogs have been speaking about it all week. But, as strong as this season has been–and it has been very strong–this episode sticks out in my mind as one in which the audience did not come first, even if Lloyd is right that this was not product placement in the traditional sense. It makes me like the show just slightly less than I did before.
What do you think about product placement in your media? Is it a fair way to go, considering the upheaval in traditional advertising? Am I reading the Modern Family episode correctly? Was the iPad episode in good taste? Is an entire episode focused on a product too much? Or, as Lloyd seems to suggest, in our object-driven society, is it perfectly normal for a day to go by in which we think only of products?
Image via The Unofficial Apple Weblog
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