The hidden history of product placement

Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Dec, 2006 by Jay Newell, Charles T. Salmon, Susan Chang

Product Placement on Radio and Television

The clothier Browning King created the first sponsored program on radio around the Browning King Orchestra and thus integrated advertising with the program name (Barnouw, 1978). In radio especially, program talent would do double duty by shifting roles from entertainers to pitchmen for their sponsor's products. Subtle product mentions were not infrequent. For example, radio scriptwriter Irna Phillips routinely included her sponsor's products in speculative scripts for programs such as Today's Children (Lears, 1994).

However, the sponsored nature of radio and television in the United States created a different environment for product placement from motion pictures, and with the successful diffusion of television into American homes, product placement became an adversarial encounter between the networks and paid sponsors on one side and product promoters on the other. There were three primary reasons that radio and television networks were antagonistic to product placement. The first was that the broadcast networks had agreed to limits on the amount of commercial time, and product placement, even unpaid, could be counted as in-program advertising and thus reduce the amount of advertising time available for sale. The second was that the essential revenue stream for broadcast networks was the sale of commercial time to advertisers. Product placements gave nonadvertisers free access to what network clients were buying. The third reason for the negative response to product placement was that the benefits offered to movie studios by product placement, such as offscreen publicity and free props, were less valuable in the limited-competition and low-production cost arena of television and radio.

Although the Broadcast Advertising Bureau recommended that program producers avoid all trade references ("Tie-In Advertising," 1951), publicity agents worked with writers to plant product appearances or mentions, with occasional reports of writers accepting bribes for the inclusion of product names in scripts. One public relations firm in Los Angeles charged $250 per insertion to manufacturers for products such as Paper Mate pens, Tabasco sauce, and Life Savers candy in shows by Milton Berle, Jack Benny, and Bob Hope. A reported $100 went to the programs' writers (Christopher, 1956). Agricultural products such as prunes and artichokes had their own agent in Hollywood making placements, whereas other companies such as Pan American Airways and Trailways busses continued the motion picture tradition of providing transportation for on-screen appearances (Esterly, 1978). For the most part, product placements in television were under-the-table arrangements between product promoters and program talent and scriptwriters, in which on-screen appearances were traded for cash payments to talent.

Skirmishes between networks and product promoters were noted throughout the 1950s in NBC's Continuity Acceptance Reports (CART), first weekly and then monthly memoranda from the network's standards and practices department, the group that functioned as the network censors for both programming and advertising. The memoranda, written by NBC's manager of continuity acceptance, Stockton Helffrich, began in 1948. Concerns about taste in programming and advertising predominate, with topics that included sexuality, alcohol, crime, racial stereotyping, violence, juvenile delinquency, religion, profanity, and advertising credibility (Pondillo, 2003). Product placement, as both plugs that were deleted front scripts and those aired after slipping by the censors, was an ongoing issue in CART reports.