Product placement

Here’s a FQ that became a DP (daily post).

DBenson asks:

Did you ever get asked/pressured to do a star informercial episode?

Not that specifically, but we have had our brushes with product placement, a similar animal.  

Back in the ’00’s there was a company that tried to marry writers with sponsors.  The trade off was the sponsor would pay for the show in exchange for say a scene in every episode that took place in their store.  The shows would then be offered to networks for free.  The sponsors would pay for them instead of the network, which was a great incentive.  

We were approached to create a series with this arrangement.  We passed.  They said, “All you need is to do one scene in (for example) Home Deport.”  The trouble is — what if during the week we decided the Home Depot scene didn’t work or wasn’t needed?  We’d still be obligated to do some scene in Home Deport that lasted a certain amount of time.  

That’s just bad story telling.  And we didn’t want that obligation.  It felt like a deal with the devil.

Apparently, we weren’t the only ones to pass on that opportunity.  The company never really caught hold and within a couple of years faded away.  

Our only other brush with product placement was the scene where Rita Wilson drinks a Coke in VOLUNTEERS.  But as I’ve written about several times, that scene came out of research and was written several years before Coca-Cola owned the studio that made the movie.  But boy, did we take shit.  


from By Ken Levine