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Mr. Right-Click and I saw Morgan Spurlock’s The Greatest Movie Ever Sold this weekend, a “documentary” about the practices and procedures governing product placement and sponsorship in movies/entertainment. The premise of the movie is that Spurlock approached the movie with the intent to have the entire thing financed by product placement while keeping the entire process transparent for the audience (FYI: technically, the movie is called POM Presents The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, because POM Pomegranate juice paid $1 million to have naming rights of the movie). It’s a funny movie and though it doesn’t necessarily teach you anything you don’t already know, it does expose the specifics of product placement sausage making in a way that you don’t usually get to see.
The movie reminded me of the product placement experiment I conducted about a year ago on this blog, that ended ultimately with me deciding that product placement does not work for my blog. I am still struggling to articulate the reasons for this, and I think Spurlock comes to a similar conclusion at the end of his project (though it is never explicitly stated). The odd thing about the mechanics of sponsorship in this movie is that while on the one hand I left it feeling like Spurlock might have damaged his brand (however slightly) by making the film (his brand is fairly tied up with integrity and thumbing his nose at corporate America, so to walk around in a NASCAR-inspired sponsored suit — even tongue-in-cheek — might be something that turns out badly for him), I also left feeling a degree of increased goodwill for the brands who signed on with Spurlock for this movie, because they were willing to take a chance on an unconventional idea/project. For me, I worry that Spurlock comes out of this thing with some of his integrity compromised (as much as I don’t want that to be the case), whereas the brands are clear winners. That seems wrong to me, but it also is in keeping with what I see happening in blog sponsorship, so I thought I’d try to figure out why. See below.
1. Once you open the door to sponsorship and product placement, you give up a little of the control you have over your content.
Most people who run sponsored campaigns on their blogs will be quick to tell you that they do not change their content in order to do so, and I believe this is absolutely the case usually. The problem is, what happens when you invite a sponsor into the fold is that there are ways they influence you that happen on levels that are almost unintelligible — ways in which they are filtering your creative voice almost without you knowing it. There is a scene in The Greatest Movie Ever Sold in which Spurlock is talking to executives from Ban deodorant (the first sponsor to sign on to the project) and they say they don’t need to influence the content directly, except that they would like to ensure that Ban is not portrayed in a negative light. This seems reasonable, right? Because why would they pay money to have their product portrayed badly? So Spurlock says something like, “Of course not. If you’re paying to be in this movie, I’m going to feel positively toward your brand,” and that makes sense as well. I’m sitting in the audience and I’m thinking, “Wow, *I* feel positively toward Ban deodorant right now because they’re considering this.”
But wait — once Ban signs on you have lost some control already: 1) you have to feature Ban in your movie, and how likely is it that you would ever have done that otherwise?; 2) you cannot do anything with Ban that might be construed as being negative, because that will upset the sponsors, and so you’ve already eliminated a large portion of possibilities because they are not likely to be considered “positive” by the sponsors; and 3) you don’t even WANT to portray them negatively, you’ve decided you like this brand to which you were previously neutral just because they are giving you money. How is that artistic freedom? It’s not, even if it’s just a matter of a small degree of control you’ve given up.
2. Once you open the door to sponsorship and product placement, your opportunities start to increase.
Once Spurlock was able to get one sponsor, opportunities started opening up more easily for him. At one point in the movie, he plays a voicemail message from an agent who wants to put him in a prime project that involves heavy corporate sponsorship — an unsolicited offer with big name stars already attached to it. With getting brands to back you, it seems like the hardest sell is the first one — once you get your foot in the door, the rest come much more easily.
3. Once you open the door to sponsorship and product placement, you start to lose perspective.
The flip side of the increased opportunities is that the line between getting paid and “selling out” starts to get blurrier. Spurlock was shaken by the unsolicited offer because he realized how attractive it sounded to him now, when just a few months before he was inspired to do a whole project based on the sliminess of product placement practices. He states, “How are you supposed to say ‘no’ to that?” when he plays the voicemail message containing the project offer. But a few months before, he would never have considered it in the first place.
4. Brands have more to gain from these partnerships, content creators have the most to lose.
I think that what happens with this stuff is that you go into a movie with low expectations for how a brand is going to come off. Basically, unless they do something egregious, you’re at worst going to feel neutrally for a brand. At best, you might walk away from a product placement feeling better toward a brand: you’re going in at zero, so it takes very little to improve.
But with content creators (filmmakers, bloggers, etc.), we presumably go in with a higher opinion and it takes very little to lower that opinion. Surprisingly little. Does this mean bloggers or filmmakers shouldn’t ever use product placement? I’m not sure — but I do think that they have more to lose than the brands that are paying them.
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There’s a tactic for promotion in blogs that has been gaining popularity about which I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, it annoys the crap out of me that bloggers who do this assume nobody can connect the dots. But on the other hand I’m kind of impressed with their ingenuity, too, so I’m not above saying that maybe this is a good idea to do, given you have certain goals and certain priorities, particularly since so many brand/blogger campaigns seem to gain success from it. At this point, it’s tough to predict what the ultimate effect on trust capital will be, if there is any.
Here’s how it works: say you’re a blogger who has some kind of gathering coming up — a party, or a conference, for which you are soliciting sponsors. Or, maybe you already had the event, and you have a list of sponsors who were promoted at that event that you’d like to keep happy. So what you do is, you mention that brand in your blog (or blogs, if you write in multiple places). And the mention is sort of organic, right? Because maybe you actually use the product and actually want to evangelize about it.
Except . . . then the product shows up a few months later in a gift bag at a party you are throwing. Or, the company that makes the product ends up as a sponsor of your event. You can’t really say these things happened because you evangelicized about them, and you definitely cannot call them sponsored posts because it’s most likely no money changed hands for that particular interaction. But . . . still. It’s not exactly disinterested promotion.
Example No. 1: Tieks
For example . . . Tieks. If you’re not familiar with Tieks, they are a brand of ballet slippers that were given away to the attendees of the Mighty Summit last year. Except just a few months before that, in an ostensibly unrelated move, Tieks were mentioned on Mighty Girl, the blog written by Maggie Mason, one of the founders of the Mighty Summit. And just recently, Tieks were mentioned on the blog Laura Mayes (another Mighty Summit co-founder) writes for Babble, along with a coupon to get 15% off.
In both of these cases, there is no disclosure of a relationship between the blogger and the brand. And I don’t think there should be, at least according to the way the FCC rules work. But on the other hand, I don’t see this shit flying in the New York Times.
Example No. 2: OPI nail polish
Did you notice that Number 25 on Allison Czarnecki’s life list is to “Name an Opi Nail polish color“? I’ve always found OPI polish’s names kind of interesting — not sure I’d put it on my life list, necessarily, but who am I to judge? Except . . . the Social Luxe party (organized by Czarnecki) gave out OPI nail polishes in their swag bag last year, which is fine because maybe Allison is a huge fan of OPI — many people are. But what about the fact that OPI also appears in a gift guide (along with some Aveda products, which I also received in a gift bag last year from the Social Luxe party), and a mention of a new Fall line of OPI polishes also warranted a whole post. , and . .? Are the two things unrelated? And the fact that OPI was a sponsor of the EVO Conference last year (a conference that Allison Czarnecki is in some way connected to, though I’m not clear on the precise terms) . . . is that unrelated? You tell me.
By the way, there are tons of other examples of this — I am singling these out because they are the easiest for me to document, but I’ve seen this happen again and again in blogs recently, spread among a wide population of bloggers. And in nearly every case, this method of promotion is wildy successful — I’d venture to guess that it’s far more successful (and cheaper) than a traditional sponsored post campaign, in fact. There’s part of me that thinks that this is just how things are done. But then, I also wonder if it will have an effect on a blogger’s credibility long term if they lean too much on this kind of officially unsponsored sponsored post to promote their other projects.
What do you think? Am I being stodgy again? Is this just how things are done, and I should go back to my ivory tower? Does it bother you when you see this stuff cropping up again and again? Do you even notice it?
Some of you have been asking me to write about MckMama for a while now. (If you’re not familiar with MckMama, she is a blogger named Jennifer McKinney who blogs at MyCharmingKids.net, and who is most notable IMO to outsiders for the fact that she has inspired a huge following that is only surpassed in size by the legion of people who despise her.) I’ve shied away from it because I don’t feel like I’ve ever reached a sufficient understanding of the MckMama situation to provide any valuable insight.
That said: this is really interesting (if by interesting you mean “bad”), and I thought it might be an instructive point about the illusive nature of trust capital. Recently MckMama was hosting a giveaway involving Lansinoh breast pumps. In her posts on the topic, she had made reference to speaking to people “from Lansinoh” about the giveaway. Somehow (and when I say “somehow” I mean, one of MckMama’s detractors probably told them, since Lansinoh stated that the tweets were “address[ing] consumers’ questions about our involvement”) Lansinoh’s official Twitter account was informed of this and set about making it abundantly clear that Lansinoh had NOT been involved in any such giveaway, that they had never worked with MckMama in any capacity.
Well. That’s odd. And some confusion followed, which was kind of cleared up when Lansinoh posted on their blog that they had not run the giveaway, and in fact what had happened was that some PR subcontractor had given MckMama the pumps for a giveaway on her blog:
Late in the day on Feb. 7, Lansinoh was informed that Ms. McKinney was in fact part of a sampling effort carried out by a third-party service provider. Due to an unfortunate breakdown in communication, Lansinoh was not informed that four Affinity® Double Electric Breast Pumps were indeed provided to Ms. McKinney. Lansinoh is taking steps to address the breakdown in the approval process that contributed to this misinformation.
Well, I guess that PR subcontractor won’t be hired again, since Lansinoh wants nothing to do with any of this, reiterating “Lansinoh does not support or endorse the blog My Charming Kids or @MckMama.” Jennifer McKinney’s response is here, if you’d like to read it.
The takeaway for me is this: attention and trust capital are sneaky bitches. The whole thing reminds me of the story about Snooki from Jersey Shore getting gifts of competing designer handbags sent to her by companies who didn’t want her carrying their own bags. In other words: endorsement seems like a great idea until it doesn’t, and the audience turns on both you and the brand that you’re pimping.
Now listen: I’m an outsider, and I don’t know what the “true” story is here, and I’m not really sure it even matters. Both sides of the MckMama equation are pretty vehement about being right. But the only thing I know for sure is that when you have companies trying to absolve themselves of any kind of association with you, I think it might be time to reassess your personal branding message a bit. All bloggers have critics, and whether the criticisms are correct is really not relevant: if you get enough critics after you, they will become a market force of their own. This is why you cannot just ignore all of the critics and hope they will go away — what you might actually lose is all of your credibility.
You know what the world needs more of? Social media consultants! AWESOME. Anyway, if you need help with your blog, you know, hire me if you feel like it.
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Mr. Right-Click and I saw Morgan Spurlock’s The Greatest Movie Ever Sold this weekend, a “documentary” about the practices and procedures governing product placement and sponsorship in movies/entertainment. The premise of the movie is that Spurlock approached the movie with the intent to have the entire thing financed by product placement while keeping the entire process transparent for the audience (FYI: technically, the movie is called POM Presents The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, because POM Pomegranate juice paid $1 million to have naming rights of the movie). It’s a funny movie and though it doesn’t necessarily teach you anything you don’t already know, it does expose the specifics of product placement sausage making in a way that you don’t usually get to see.
and thumbing his nose at corporate America, so to walk around in a NASCAR-inspired sponsored suit — even tongue-in-cheek — might be something that turns out badly for him), I also left feeling a degree of increased goodwill for the brands who signed on with Spurlock for this movie, because they were willing to take a chance on an unconventional idea/project. For me, I worry that Spurlock comes out of this thing with some of his integrity compromised (as much as I don’t want that to be the case), whereas the brands are clear winners. That seems wrong to me, but it also is in keeping with what I see happening in blog sponsorship, so I thought I’d try to figure out why. See below.
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