Advertisers for years have sought to have their products weaved into the stories of television shows. The positive image of a well-known personality gulping a cola, tooling around in a recognized sports car, or shaking flakes from a cereal box can boost sales.
Unfortunately, for advertisers, the plugs don't always come off as intended. The products sometimes have been handled clumsily by TV producers, confusing the message advertisers want to send viewers or, worse, casting the product in a negative light.
Now, in an effort to gain control over how products are integrated into shows, one of the world's biggest ad agencies and a major producer of reality television are teaming up to make programs on behalf of sponsors and sell them to networks.
They hope the networks, which are under intense economic pressure and face eroding audiences, will be willing to buy the shows in part because they should cost less.
Under the venture, RDF Media, which makes "Wife Swap" and "Secret Millionaire," has taken over management of Omnicom Media Group's Full Circle Entertainment, a firm formed five years ago to develop TV programs to showcase advertisers' products. Omnicom's clients include major sponsors Pepsi, McDonald's and Visa.
The deal is the latest example of how the relationship between advertisers and the networks has been thrown into upheaval as television's economic foundation is crumbling. Advertisers are spending less and the value of their favored marketing tool -- the 30-second commercial -- is diminishing because of viewers' increased use of digital video recorders, including TiVo, which allows viewers to skip commercials.
"The prime-time economic model is under increasing pressure," media analyst Larry Gerbrandt said. "If they bring advertisers in on the ground floor then that might offset some of the production costs. That also means these shows can be profitable even with lower ratings."
At the same time, Gerbrandt noted, Omnicom and RDF will have to be careful about turning the programs they produce on behalf of advertisers into thinly disguised infomercials. "To work, the show still has to stand on its own," he said.
For more than 50 years the networks have developed the programming, controlled the content and invited advertisers to participate. The shows produced by the venture would flip that relationship by putting the advertisers in the driver's seat and the networks more in the passenger's role.
