Hacker News Reader

Comment by tantanel | Hacker News Reader

Well, Netflix does have advertising in their originals, but it's much less in intrusive than the regular ad breaks. It comes in the form of product placement - characters preferring certain brands of beer, going to certain supermarkets, being fascinated by certain gadgets etc. House of Cards even had a warning about it at the beginning of the show, at least on Netflix UK.

Personally I'm not too bothered by it as long as it's subtle, and so far it has been.

View on HN

Perhaps I'm just sensitive to it but the House of Cards placement in particular seemed really conspicuous to me. (Maybe especially because they just all had iPhones in the previous season and so there were lots of iPhone shots when they used their phones).

But generally I find I notice the product placement spots because they seem out of the flow of the program, I guess they work best when the brand is more hands-off and lets the creator do it subtly.

I think I would have noticed far less of the placements if it hadn't been for the "warning" before the episodes. :)

Amusingly I didn't notice the warning!

I don't even notice them and even if I had I wouldn't mind. I mean characters will use a phone in the series, the production might as well get something out of it. It becomes a problem when the plot is built around the product placement e.g its done a lot in modern family

It was pretty heavy handed in some episodes of House of Cards. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGDgnp7-uck

Out of context like that it seems really obvious, but with the background of the character (he likes playing video games to relax), the first time I saw that it didn't seem so out of place for him to be interested in the gadgets. It does seem incredibly blatant in the clip though.

> (he likes playing video games to relax)

No, he likes playing video games on his PLAYSTATION(TM) to relax, and it feels like this bit of character detail was kludged in purely to satisfy the product placement requirement.

It's obvious that with a different sponsor the character would have had different behaviours.

I dunno about that. The dialogue felt natural to me.

I've only watched a few episodes of House of Cards, and none of them were this episode.

I can see why you'd consider it heavy handed. Had I watched that in the episode proper, it would have set off the 'placement ad!' bell in my head.

However, as stated elsewhere, that's orders of magnitude less invasive than a real ad., and it would not break the flow of the show, for me, at all.

It's really the same kind of exchange I have actually been involved with many times in real life.

I've just started watching House of Cards this month, and there is a disclaimer from Netflix that the show contains product placements, so at least they're being honest about it.

IANAL but I also think it might be illegal not to disclaim it in certain places. Not sure about UK, but it definitely is in certain European countries.

Belgium is one of those countries. We have a little PP logo displayed at the start of shows that contain product placement.

Ah, so that's what that means!

Apparently there's a logo that has to be run before & after the show - but only if the show is made in the UK - https://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv-radio-and-on-demand/advice-for-c...

FWIW, I watched House of Cards in the the US and did not see any disclaimers about product placement.

I actually played the amazing game Monument Valley after seeing it in House of Cards. Although from what I can recall this wasn't paid placement so much as the writers just loved the game.

I just looked that up because I couldn't believe it. What? It's so ham fisted!

To be fair, actors often use their own phones and those tend to be iPhones far more often than they are with the general population.

To be fair, network and cable TV shows do this as well - AND run commercials.

I guess its okay if its subtle, but I'm still scratching my head over an episode of Mr. Robot that was pretty much an Amazon Alexa commercial. The Alexa dialogue didn't do anything to advance the plot or build out the characters or build drama. It was completely tacked on and a bizarre attempt at several minutes of product placement. Worse, the USA Network also runs ads. So it was needless double-dipping.

To be fair, the message I got from that episode was "Alexa is a poorly designed friend replacement for lonely people", so I'm not sure Amazon really got their money's worth there.

Yeah, I saw it asa way to flesh out the anti-social nature of Dom. And I'm not sure if it's the same episode as her Alexa chats, but the scene of the lawyer's apartment going all haunted (via hack) certainly isn't a strong endorsement for smart homes.

I thought the Alexa part was an easy explanation of how alone the character is.

Nokia's banana phone and Matrix comes to mind. I assume it was a product placement or they just picked what at the time was a good looking phone, though it seems odd now.

The phone from the movie was just to look cool -- while Nokia did make the slider phone, they never made the spring-loaded version in the movie.

The Nokia 8110 is the one used in the Matrix. The later model, the 7110, was spring loaded. I still have mine. The spring broke, which is a bit frustrating. At the time it was a really nice phone though.

http://neuro.me.uk/bitsnbobs/matrixphone/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7110

It helps to remember what phones look like at the time. They were all fairly ugly and blocky. The spring loaded mouthpiece was fairly cool looking. Of course, it doesn't exist. That phone never had a spring in it. That was a modification for the movie and I'm fairly certain you couldn't make out the logo or brand. So I'm guessing this probably wasn't product placement. Imagine the angry customers flocking to the store to see that the phone doesn't do what it did in the movies.

If it's done tastefully it's actually less jarring than blurring out brands or making up fake ones.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com