Californication – a prime-time Showtime TV drama – celebrates the womanizing exploits of a lazy rockstar writer named Hank Moody (played David Duchovny). It has some good moments and sharp, engaging dialogue mixed in with the rough. But it jumped the shark for me personally, when it engaged in ultra-sneaky product placement for a social media site that pushed past all known bounds of advertising.
Chillin’ and shillin’ with a product placement for Guitar Hero
Moody lusts after a hot college student (Eva Amurri) who says she moonlights as a stripper. When he goes to her strip club to find out more, she doesn’t go by her normal name. Her stripper pseudonym, she explains, is “Ashley Madison.”
“Hi! On this show, I’m just a dating site ad disguised as a woman.”
She introduces herself to the other guests by her full pseudonym, and they emphatically repeat her name full name – more than once – to clarify it. Something about they way she emphasized her name seemed unnatural for a TV show. And something about her name faintly ‘rang a bell.’ Sure enough, when I Google’d her name – I found AshleyMadison.com – a dating site for married people looking to have affairs.
Wow! A prime-time TV character who is essentially nothing but sexploitation ad for a shady dating site! I’m used to fake “hotties” from dating sites showing up on Facebook and Craigslist and spamming in my inbox. But this was a whole ‘nother level in stealth, commercialization and subconscious suggestion implanting.
- Was naming a alluring character after a shady dating site ‘clever marketing’? Hell yes!
- Was this advertising effective? It worked on me, I Google’d “her” and encountered the product.
- Does it kill the show’s credibility? Definitely. How can you trust the characters after that?
A more traditional, semi-transparent product placement for Skype
If the content is otherwise credible and top-notch, I can tolerate a smattering of more traditional product placement – like the featuring of a Skype logo through a foggy, translucent window in a scene where characters using Skype’s call-waiting features and audio tones. But I worry a little when I start to think “Ya know, that entire scene and dialogue wasn’t created for artistic or dramatic reasons – it was just filler designed to facilitate the placement of a subliminal advertisement.”
But the very essence of a TV drama is to create lifelike characters that people trust and ‘believe in’ enough to allow them escape from reality for 30 minutes. And when the actors and actresses are pitching products while they’re supposed to be sincerely seducing us into suspension of disbelief – the whole illusion goes up in a flash.
What’s your take on product placement? Have you seen social media sites make paid appearances on other shows?
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