Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway66666 | Hacker News Reader

Netflix puts the ads directly inside the shows they control themselves. This way no adblock can censor them, and Netflix can prance around pretending they are saints for not showing ads.

Example "Hey let's call an uber" says character A.

"I watched X on netflix yesterday" says character B.

View on HN

I'm guessing you don't have kids and haven't actually experienced the difference.

- Netflix has gobs of kids shows (i.e., cartoons) that have zero product placement, at least as far as I can tell. This includes both Netflix originals and the rest.

- TV has 6-minute ad breaks every few minutes that are non-stop pitches for toys and other shows. It's unbearable.

Even shows on premium networks with some product placement and mentions are 1000x better than regular cable. There's simply no comparison.

I literally cannot watch television anymore. Advertising is such a huge annoyance. What's worse is that it's the same five adverts played every six minutes all damn day! Meanwhile nothing actually can happen in the shows themselves since there's so little time actually devoted to it instead of revenue generating ads

Same, I'm completely spoiled by ublock origin, Netflix, and Spotify Premium. Last time I killed my phone, I drove around in silence rather than listening to the radio and when Mozilla broke the extensions in Firefox a couple of weeks ago, I almost stopped using the internet altogether for a couple of days.

You need a Pihole in your network. It is excellent. It’s also handy for sorting out pet peeves (though does impose them on others in your network).

Sounds like the TV version of what happened to most news sites, with ads everywhere.

My understanding is that, at least in the UK, advertising on television is way way way better, as in, a few minutes an hour of much more gentle advertisements.

A typical show on a commercial channel here will have three ad breaks in a one hour slot, of about five minutes each, and then there’ll be a longer ad break between programs. It drives me mad now I’m used to video on demand, but not nearly as much as US TV would.

Hmm, I thought it was less than that. I still consider that to be unacceptable

I haven’t watched TV in years... when I’ve caught some movie on TV at my parents’ or my in-laws’, I’ve found the ad breaks to be a great opportunity to... leave and do something better with my time than watch this movie with stupid ad breaks.

What really gets me about advertising is how much they annoy me, how much they wreck my leisure time, and how little money they make for it. For 4 minutes of annoying the heck out of me, they can expect to make single-digit pennies. What a freaking waste. If you're going to annoy me that much, at least make a couple bucks.

I cancelled sky a few years ago. They charge £30 a month and then put adverts on. Adverts are 1% of their revenue, so £3 a month.

If I watch 2 hours a day that’s 20 hours of ads a month, or 15p/hour.

I’m currently subscribed to nowtv to watch GoT. There’s an unskippavle advert at the start for other shows. That’s just about acceptable for the 6 times i’ll use it before cancellation.

DVDs used to be as bad, and I almost entirely stopped buying them because of it. they don’t seem to come with adverts now though.

I absolutely hate radio ads as well to the point where my next car is a Tesla because its one of the few vehicles that simply has no radio.

My current vehicle has a MS Sync/Carplay/AndroidAuto that reverts to radio when disconnected. The radio invariable has an ad on.

Tesla has radio

Why don't you just not use the radio?

I go out if my way as far as possible to avoid advertised products/services. Especially drugs, like 2 out of 3 ads are from pharmas. I opt for generics whenever it is possible.

The only time I prefer watching TV is when I want to have breaks in between while doing my chores. So I would watch 'The Office' and go about doing by work by mentally disconnecting myself when ads are running. New stuff is always Prime or Netflix. Though I get how annoying it can be for kids shows, with toy ads and disney ads (each spring time I swear it is annoying), not that I wouldn't take my kids to disney

If you've seen my nephew's toy hoard with hundreds of small plastic figurines from Thomas, Paw Patrol, and Daniel Tiger, you wouldn't say there are zero product placements in kids' shows.

This is ALL over so many shows on cable TV. It hit me one day when watching bones. Two characters had a conversation about the features of their "awesome" car.

I also recently saw this on "A million little things" there was an absolutely useless shot of a main character opening the trunk of the car with a foot wave. It was so over done and out of place.

I think I know the exact scene you're talking about in Bones, it was a super obvious advertisement. Car starts making beeping noises "Why's the car beeping?", "Oh, it's the new lane assist feature in my Toyota Prius. It lets me know if I'm starting to drift across the lane because I'm distracted." Then they get to the destination and they show off the automatic parallell parking.

Everything in the new Jurassic Park movies is mercedes. Even the weird sphere-car thing is made by mercedes. There is also a prominently featured starbucks in the dinosaur park.

The movie is aware of how ridiculous is getting and a character says "Verizon Wireless presents The Indominus T-Rex!!!". I guess the writers took a jab at the producers and their deals.

------

But the worst was in the recent Jim Jarmusch film, where Adam Driver says "You can order it and it will arrive with free 2 day shipping". In a Jim Jarmusch film, one of the most respected "underground" movie directors of our generation!!! But his movie was funded by amazon studios so.. no surprises there.

Someone should really make a "product placement in movies" hall of shame and get internet famous.

Not exactly a hall of shame, but you might have a good time looking through https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/ProductPlacement/Live...

Those were quite entertaining to read through!

It really made me think that not all product placement is created equal. Sometimes there are products that don't serve a purpose just sitting somewhere really conspicuously, but something like the Snack Packs in Billy Madison never once struck me as a product placement, they just seemed like a goofy thing that a kid would get really worked up over, and it ended up being one of the most quotable lines of the movie.

And that got me thinking about product placement in general, and how much stuff on that list is just products being on screen, period. I'm sure none of that ever happens on accident, but at least for me personally, it can contribute to the art to have a certain brand be present (like the Wayne's World example).

In my own life, there are brands that evoke specific feelings like road trips, or sporting events, or drunkenness, or LAN parties, or childhood in general and seeing a generic bag of burgers on screen doesn't have the same effect as seeing a bag of McDonalds... I mean, it doesn't really matter and this is all silly conjecture, but people's reactions to seeing real life brands on screen are quite interesting!

I actually find it a bit weird to watch something nominally set in the real world where everything is conspicuously covered up, and they get coffee from Generic Grey Cup, their computers from NoBrand Aluminum Cases, their fizzy sodas from Vaguely Red Can Corp., their cell phones from The Unbranded Glass Slabs Conglomerate, etc. In real life, there are some brands around. But in real life, nobody spontaneously rhapsodizes about how awesome their monitor is, or at least, not very often.

Good point!

My monitor is pretty awesome, though.

There's some pretty egregious examples of product placement in that list, but some of them aren't so bad. For example, Bruce Wayne driving a Lamborghini Murciélago in Batman. On top of showing everyone what a rich playboy he is, murciélago is Spanish for "bat".

I kind of liked how Amazon's Alexa device was used in Mr Robot. It actually got to provide plot driving insight into Dom's psychological state.

YES. Oh man it was terrible.

Well there was that (product placement) scene in Weeds where they talk about the Prius being a great "dealer" car because the silent mode is great for drive-by shootings.

IIRC, Weeds was on Netflix.

Oh.. I just took that as a joke. And where's the line, if the writers come up with some (non-defamatory) joke (or whatever) about some real product, that relies on real-world context about that product, is there pressure to get a product placement deal, or else drop it from the script?

Seems silly.

It's everywhere. Avengers Endgame made sure the Audi logo was filling a nice portion of the screen the two or three times Audis (the only cars in the whole movie) rolled up somewhere.

Right! After too much time watching CinemaSins I automatically think "This movie brought to you by ____" when I see a prominent logo.

Like the Microsoft Surface in Marvel's Netflix series.

Remember the Oracle cloud in iron man? Cringe

The breaking bad Chrysler/dodge revving scenes were egregious.

It's called product placement [1].

There are rules restricting it in the UK, which must complicate broadcasting some American TV shows.

There are also companies using software to replace the branded product according to different markets — so they can rebrand that cereal box for the rerun if necessary.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_placement

You choose the shows your kids watch; you don't get to choose what commercials a cable/airwave channel shows you.

I am not saying cable is better. I am saying that netflix has a lot of hidden marketing in their shows (for adults, I don't have kids and I don' watch kids shows) that praising them for being ad-free is kinda disgenious.

In the end of the day I 'd rather get a big blinking "this is an ad" banner on my ads, rather than the characters smirking on camera while drinking from a nescafe cup while waiting for an uber to arrive. Maybe those are not actual ads and the show writers just added uber and nescafe for narrative purposes, I don't know, because it doesn't tell us.

>netflix has a lot of hidden marketing in their shows

I really believe there's hidden cigarette marketing. Maybe directors are just taking artistic license that they can't on cable, but it just really feels like there's a noticeable increase of on-screen smoking in a lot of their originals.

Maybe, but I honestly feel like it just coincides with the whole neo-noir and lazy-noir genre coming back, where smoking/drinking at very regular intervals throughout the day is a staple. Part of the reason I feel this way is the fact that I was never able to tell or even notice the brand of cigarettes the characters were smoking.

For the last two decades "TV boxes" have been almost as common as TVs in households in my country. They let you record multiple things at the same time, automatically record a TV series, pause and rewind what you're watching etc. So instead of sitting through commercials people might hit record on a bunch of things they are interested in and watch them later (skipping over the commercials) or maybe even pause the TV for a short break in order to streamline the show. Personally I've never has a Smart TV so I might be behind the times using this method.

Many Smart TVs have buffers that allow pausing and rewind of the current channel. You can pause a show for a bit and then skip over the commercials like with a DVR.

On a related note I let my young kid watch Wheel of Fortune and then we get hit with “tune in to news at 11 to find out how this girl got horrifically abducted and abused 10 times.”

I’m so accustomed to Netflix and it’s child controls that I totally forgot what legacy tv is like.

This! My dad likes to put the news on during the day when we visit and this type of thing happens all the time.

Good point, but subtle product placement is a TON better than explicitly pushing sugary cereal as a "part of a wholesome breakfast" for 2 minutes straight.

Regular tv does this equally if not more.

"Is that a PS Vita? I have a console at home; I play sometimes to relax. I oughta get one of these for the car" - House of Cards

Yes, ruining the content itself is not better than pausing for ads.

Isn't that just realistic, though? That's how dialogue in real life sounds, too. I and most people I know use "uber" as a generic term for a ride share service. We also distinguish which streaming service the show we're talking about is on if it's not already known by everybody in the conversation.

I see two big issues.

The first one is about how well it is integrated in the show, or how "respectfully" it is done.

Let's say for example... Car brands are very welcome and a must in the Fast and Furious movies. It would be pretty silly if they had fake car brands in such a movie, and the presence of real car models can excite and make the enthousiasts nerd out more about them. Overall a victory for everyone involved.

But hearing how great of a family car a Volvo can be, in a movie about aliens... not so much.

-------

The second is about transparency. Assuming you do not like let's say Monsanto, or Scientology and you would like to avoid works that are funded by them. Product placement is a form of guerilla marketing, noone says who they took money from. So it lacks transparency and is disgenius to the consumers.

It's a bit like influencer marketing, when influencers "forget" to include the #sponsored hashtag.

User ksdale has left a very nice comment on the subject.

That's product placement and it's everywhere. Netflix might still be saving kids from 400 hours of commercials even if they have some commercials themselves.

I'll take two instances of product placement in an hour's programming vs. 42 min of TV with 18 min advertising.

I would much rather a TV show say “Let’s call an Uber” than “Let’s call a peer to peer ride sharing service”.

Just like everyone says “I am going to Google that” not “I’m going to search for that”. One sounds stilted. The other sounds natural.

There’s also just the ideological content of the shows.

Walulis, a German Youtube channel (imagine a German John Oliver for social media with a pretty solid Hitler joke per video ratio and high quality content) had a video about this. Apparently Bill Gates is a majority stakeholder in one of the companies make billions matching companies with productions. Sometimes years before the production takes place. Another example is Stranger Things and some cereal brand.

Eggo waffles >> https://strangerthings.fandom.com/wiki/Eggos

The one!

"Another example is Stranger Things and some cereal brand."

Obviously a less than successful product placement. /s

Pretty sure it was the Eggo waffle thing you are referring to. IMO they did a pretty decent job integrating that plot-wise.

Like it or not productions cost money and the people who pay those bills will always look for a way to share the load. If you don't like it prepare for $40/month Netflix.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com