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.

Broadcasting Dares Seems A Bad Idea

From the truth-in-advertising department: the fraud-prevention company LifeLock has for a while run a series of ads in which CEO Todd Davis announces his real social security number and says that he's protected from identity theft. It's a powerful message. Too bad it's false.

According to an AP story, two LifeLock customers are suing, claiming that the service doesn't work and that the company knew it, because it didn't even work for Davis:

Attorney David Paris said he found records of other people applying for or receiving driver's licenses at least 20 times using Davis' Social Security number, though some of the applications may have been rejected because data in them didn't match what the Social Security Administration had on file.

Davis acknowledged in an interview with The Associated Press that his stunt has led to at least 87 instances in which people have tried to steal his identity, and one succeeded: a guy in Texas who duped an online payday loan operation last year into giving him $500 using Davis' Social Security number.

And then there is his answer to AP:

"There's nothing on my actual credit report about uncollected funds, no outstanding tickets or warrants or anything," he said. "There's nothing to indicate my identity has been successfully compromised other than the one instance. I know I'm taking a slightly higher risk. But I'll take my risk for the tremendous benefit we're bringing to society and to consumers."

So much for testimonials from the interested - and the degree to which a company can actually protect your identity, which can be a lot more than trying to fill a credit application.

Editor Returns to PC World, But Does "Good" Win Out?

In another of my blogs I had mentioned that PC World editor Harry McCracken had left the publication because of pressure from the advertising side of the house. It seems that a pro/con set of articles about Macs - both written by people who knew and liked the machines - had drawn ire either the advertiser didn't like negative press, or someone was afraid that it wouldn't.

So now McCracken is back at PC World after a week and the magazine's CEO, Colin Crawford, has returned to his previous duties as vice president of online content. Some in the publishing industry have been cheering this as a rare victory of integrity over advertising, but I'm not sure that's really the case.

This seems clearly a move to stem bad press. Had publisher IDG really thought that advertising pressure to censor articles was so egregious, I suspect it would have dismissed Crawford. But it didn't. Instead, management transferred him back to from whence he came. But IDG has been vocal about how online is really the future for the company. So the person who was ready to push editors and tailor content (and pretty mild content at that - oooh, the puck mouse was a loser, what a burn!) to turn a magazine into a PR outlet is now in charge of the publisher's future. Now there's a decisive - and telling - move.