Archive for June 5th, 2007

Hot shot Hollywood producer Ben Silverman (he who brought the reality TV show Big Brother to CBS) has just been hired as co-chairman of NBC’s entertainment division and studio, where he’ll head programming with fellow cochair Marc Graboff on the business side.

Now, I know that some of you might say that since quality, creativity and independence are already such rare commodities in contemporary TV, it’s not worth getting all riled about increased product placement. But the fact that the TV landscape is poised to get even worse is not something we should simply accept with a yawn. As I discussed in a two-part series on product placement for Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture magazine:

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In an era when some 20% of homes are equipped with ad-skipping devices, product placement in television shows is growing. New data out this morning show just how much.

The amount of “branded entertainment” featured on prime-time network television grew 89% year over year, according to a first-quarter report released on Tuesday by TNS Media Intelligence. Six minutes and 22 seconds of the average prime-time hour are devoted to in-show brand appearances, the report says.

No wonder. In addition to the TiVo (nasdaq: TIVO - news - people ) phenomenon, TNS says overall ad spending in the U.S. fell 0.3% in the first quarter, to $34.93 billion, compared with the same period a year earlier. The collective decline was even more glaring for the period’s 10 biggest advertisers, which include Procter & Gamble (nyse: PG - news - people ), AT&T (nyse: T - news - people ), General Motors (nyse: GM - news - people ) and Verizon (nyse: VZ - news - people ). These blue chip companies spent a combined $4.36 billion during the first quarter, down 8% from the year before.

During this period, Internet display advertising grew 16.7% this quarter, to $2.7 billion, while broadcast TV spending, which was adversely affected by comparisons against last year’s Olympics coverage, plummeted 7.2% to $6.05 billion, and newspaper spending fell 4.7% to $6.28 billion during the same period…

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