Response to "Advertising Within Shows"

This is my response to Jackie's blog post, which can be viewed here: http://jackiejesusblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/advertising-within-shows.html

Hey Jackie! You make a great point about how irrelevant and insubstantial some advertisements are starting to become. I agree with your comment that "since commercials tend to have a lackluster effect on many people, advertisers have turned to television shows and movies to sell their products". You raise the important issue of insubstantial advertising and marketing - more and more companies depend on popular TV shows, music videos, celebrities, songs, and films to market their products instead of simply advertising the products themselves.

The commercials that you have mentioned, most especially the perfume commercials, wholly portray how companies are increasingly becoming more dependent on popular culture to market their products. The Gucci Perfume commercial (which can be viewed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVHcqjjjnFY) features various models spontaneously breaking out in dance to Blondie's Heart of Glass. I couldn't exactly find a relevance between dancing models and the product itself. Like you said, "most perfume commercials have nothing to do with the scent of the product" and I could not agree more. This is just one of the few exemplary advertisements that illustrate the insubstantial relationship between the advertisement and the product.

You also mention advertising in popular television shows. At first, I noticed the subtle depictions of product placement in shows such as The Office, where office supplies are claimed by characters to have been bought from Staples. But nowadays, there are far more blatant depictions of product placement; some shows even focus whole episodes on certain brand labels. Shows like Modern Family built an entire episode on the Apple iPad as well as How I Met Your Mother, where Microsoft was the prevalent brand of one of the episodes. These blatant depictions of product placement signifies the advertising industry's growing dependency on popular culture to market their products. As a result, brand labels are starting to become more associated with their celebrity-studded advertisements instead of the actual products that they sell.

But like you said, despite the product placements and irrelevant advertising and marketing techniques, consumers should always be aware and practical when purchasing products. This is pretty much the most logical approach to avoid being sucked in by the advertisement agencies.