Television News Product Placement

It's the end of the journalistic world as we've known it: a Las Vegas television station, owned by Meredith, is taking money from McDonalds to display two cups of iced coffee, logos squarely facing the camera.

The arrangement does raise questions about potential conflicts between the intended message and news content. The ad agency that arranged the promotion said the coffee cups would most likely be whisked away if KVVU chooses to report a negative story about McDonald’s.

“If there were a story going up, let’s say, God forbid, about a McDonald’s food illness outbreak or something negative about McDonald’s, I would expect that the station would absolutely give us the opportunity to pull our product off set,” said Brent Williams, account supervisor at Karsh/Hagan, the advertising agency that arranged the deal between McDonald’s and KVVU.

The station claims that it will continue to report about McDonald's, removing the cups if there is a negative story, just as it would remove a commercial spot. But the problem here is that the advertising is no longer contained to identifiable segments. Product placement works on the theory of an implied endorsement by the people who are in the program in question. This is the line between sponsorship and ownership. I wonder if the contract with the station called for a payment of 30 pieces of silver. Probably not - the going rate for integrity is somewhat higher these days.