YouTubers have to declare ads. Why doesn't anyone else? [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
The video is fairly long (about 30 minutes), but goes into a lot of the history of advertising (explicit, product placements, paid endorsements, etc) in radio, TV, and movies in order to make a thorough case.
And those are just the obvious ones. It would be super funny if they'd have to do it retroactively.
There's a whole bunch of war movies that are absolutely NOT approved by the US DoD, because they show things in an unfavorable light. Generally this means no access to actual equipment like M1 tanks or 'real' aircraft, which must be substituted using somebody else's b-roll, or CGI.
It is generally pretty easy to tell the difference between movies that were filmed with DoD filming office cooperation (Battleship), and ones that might show something about the military in an unflattering or unprofessional light (Three Kings).
One very famous example is Apocalypse Now, the helicopter scene and a lot of the rest of it was filmed in the Philippines, after making a large payment to their military for use of the Hueys.
(There were also some tax or funding reasons I believe.)
(Side note - holds up well for a 50 year old movie; and one of the best Donald Sutherland performances, in the same year he did MASH.)
I believe at some time in the recent years, the rule got softened, so today, you're only required to show a rather useless warning before the movie. I have no idea why this was done, but I suspect studio pressure playing a role. Something like, the latest Bond movie will have sponsored content whether German government wants it or not, so the only choice is between allowing it or banning major blockbusters and pissing off a large part of the population.
I'm not aware of exactly what you ask for, probably because the military is that good at ensuring nothing bad would be filmed.
I know when I watch a TV show, large sums of money went into making the show I'm watching due to the history of television. Writers, actors, set builders, etc. were all paid during the production of a TV show and I know commercials and product placements paid for all of it.
When I watch something on YouTube, my first inkling is to think I'm watching some bloke with a webcam making a video in his basement. The history of YouTube causes me to think that the person on YouTube operates all by themselves just for the fun of it. While I know that that's not the case anymore the historic perception is still there, that's what the rules are meant to protect general public against.
YouTube creates a different kind of relationship between viewer and content creator, one that's particularly intimate and consequently persuasive.
Survivor placed the contestants on an island competing in elaborate challenges with camera's everywhere for a million dollar prize.
The Bachelor featured a wealthy suitor/suitress and a dozen attractive people of the opposite sex dressed in ridiculously expensive clothing again with camera's everywhere doing extravagant things.
Anyone can end up on YouTube, only certain people can end up on TV and viewers always have this in the back of their minds.
It may, but should that relationship be enforced? Letting well-backed productions get away with not disclosing while the less well-backed have extra rules they have to follow is just favoring incumbents. It's similar to the discussion surrounding "real journalism" and bloggers/youtubers.
The way I see it, if people listen to influencer bullshit, they're going to get sold on shitty products and that's their problem. I don't listen to influencers, I listen to friends and coworkers who can give me an honest review that I trust.
Only the US and New Zealand allow this.
It's not the side effects that mattered. It's that before the rule change they weren't allowed to talk about what the drug did at all.
And then a voice at the end saying "please drink responsibily"
I don't think it's patients the ones that need to convince the doctors of what to use. If anything, patients demanding solutions without any knowledge of whether they're useful or not would make treatment much more difficult.
> Smoking cessation products
A lot of smoking cessation products are over the counter. Here in Spain I see ads about them, and we have the same prohibition of adverts of prescription meds.
> What about PReP? It's prescription only
Sexual education covers this, no need to monetize ads. Not to mention that the return on investment on an anti-HIV medication is probably not ideal
> Lofexidine
Again, I doubt the market for opioid withdrawal meds is high enough.
> Of course promoting drugs that work are a great outcome. Like what are we even talking about?
Doctors are the one that prescribe drugs, not patients. Why would you need to market a prescription drug that one takes only after a doctor visit to patients? They are not the ones making the decision on the drug. They do not have the information required to evaluate whether the drug is appropriate or not.
At best, ads for prescription drugs will be useless because it's the doctor that makes the decision. At worst it encourages self-medication and forces doctors to make non-optimal choices due to patient pressure. The only ones that stand to benefit from prescription drugs ads are pharmaceutical companies and ad agencies.
If it works, there's no need to promote it, your doctor will know about it from better sources than TV ads. The purpose of TV ads for prescription medicine is to induce nagging behavior - trying to convince patients to nag their doctors and so increase the sales of these things.
Like all advertising, it is a practice meant to distort our behavior in a way that makes us better consumers.
Yeah they've got the drug sales reps showing up weekly with food and possibly lapdances[1] telling the doctors all they need to know about how to make the drug companies more money.
[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/01/30/stripper-...
More context
https://www.financierworldwide.com/bribery-and-corruption-in...
> Like what are we even talking about?
There's a long history of patients being easily suckered into ineffective or inappropriate medications, or even being persuaded that a condition exists that they wouldn't have been worried about otherwise. And of unscrupulous marketers persuading them to spend money on this.
Has everyone forgotten the opiates scandal? https://www.ft.com/content/7cf7b242-a6e1-11e9-984c-fac8325aa...
Or previously OxyContin (2009): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622774/
Medicine is supposed to be a science. It's supposed to be possible to determine accurately what condition someone has, what the appropriate medications to treat them might be, and for them to make an informed choice. Marketing is the opposite of that in every respect: it's incentivized to mislead people, even if it kills them.
Yet drug corporations don't do that in countries where ads for perscription drugs are banned. I guess that does not bring the same value to them as pushing drug explicitly.
Besides, while direct to consumer advertising is a more recent phenomena, pharma companies have for the longest time targeted physicians. So if there's a new treatment for your condition, your physician knows about it. Are you a suitable candidate for the treatment? That's for the physician to determine.
Commercial speech in the United States has limitations. Historically commercial speech was not protected by the 1st amendment. Protections and limitations have largely been established over the past 50 years in Supreme Court rulings [0].
[0] https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/939/corporate-speec...
Cigarettes physically harm pretty much all of their users, and they are very addicting leading to psychological and financial harm to a large number of users too, and they are available over the counter with no more than an age check to try to keep them out of the hands of non-adults.
It's fairly easy to find a substantial government interest in the physical and psychological health of the population, and regulating the spread of something addicting that directly harms that interest directly advances that interest and doesn't seem to be going too far.
Prescription drugs cannot even be sold until the government approves them, and even then they can only be sold if prescribed by a doctor. Those measures should already keep them out of the hands of those who would be harmed by them, so it is hard to see what substantial government interest a TV ad ban would directly further that couldn't be better addressed without restricting speech (e.g., limitation on who doctors can prescribe the drug to).
I'm not saying that it wouldn't be possible to sufficient justify a TV ad ban on prescription drugs. Just that it is not anywhere near as easy as it is for cigarettes.
I fully think we should be banning prescription drugs. There's precedent already for banning product ads - tobacco ads are no longer allowed for example.
I think a lot of these ads prod hypochondriacs to rush to their doctor (or perhaps even the ER) to "tell them about their symptoms" which just drives up costs for everyone.
Au contraire, people will live with all sorts of debilitating conditions, assuming that treatment is exceptionally hard.
I lived with an impacted wisdom tooth for a long time, and when it was removed I suddenly realized that it wasn't just a natural way for my body to feel.
I also just assumed that I had to poop explosively in the morning just because, and not because I drank the large cup of milk my mother gave me.
And that's normal. Loads of people are like this.
¹ I have absolutely nothing against what I'm sure is a very fine drug - it was merely the first result in my search for "most advertised prescription medication" and I'm sure that the side effects are not representative of typical outcome and that someone suffering from serious rheumatoid arthritis is better off taking the drug than not.
This isn't whats happening is it? The exemptions to free speech are well known and taught in entry level civic classes [1]. There are quite a few. Whats happening here is another discussion on the intricacies of free speech (which have hundreds of pages of professional opinion and case law for each exemption) full of nuance. However here, as is the case for most discussion forums, you can only fall into two groups: anarchist or fascist.
Heres a more honest view: given free speech laws in the US it's not clear what we should or what is right to do with regards to advertising medicine. We will probably have a populist exemption when it's needed, as we have in the past.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
I don't share you confidence that this is very obviously worth another exemption at a federal level, but I do share your concern with misinformation through these sorts of ads.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that criminalization tends to only stop law-abiding citizens, have second-order effects that discriminate against those whose needs were not considered by the policy makers at the time, create a hole that's usually filled by another issue/crime, and tend to be far less effective than they were made out to be. Just so my position is clear :)
P. S.: I am watching the video and Tom Scott gives a very similar definition of advertisement at 3:44, and basically the whole video is about how that logic is applied in British and American laws.
P. P. S.: I am now at the last section "The Land Of The Free" (24:47) where Tom Scott talks specifically about freedom of speech in US, and basically everything in this thread is brought up by him.
figured i'd just edit my comment here to add another topic: the video says the lyric "does your Spearmint lose its flavor on the bedpost..." was changed to "chewing gum" because Spearmint was a trademark, which was banned on UK radio. The wikipedia article does not mention Spearmint being a trademark. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spearmint Anybody know the story? [did more research, perhaps the answer is that Wrigley's trademarked the "arrow" design surrounding the word spearmint on the label, the arrow presumably an analogy to a "spear"]
Then it get's a bit tricky. Trademarks are a consumer protection device which affords the consumer to differentiate between competing products.
As the song appeals to a chewing gum, and it's assumed that the general public are aware of one brand, two brands or 50 brands of spearmint-flavoured chewing gums for purchase - the radio may reason that the lyric would be unfit according to their mission.
It's less about any actual trademark such as a Spearmint® Chewing Gum, than it is a public association to some marketed goods (and the BBC's stated mission to not condone such).
This is just a random reasoning of mine, so a grain of salt etc.
This entry mentions this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Does_Your_Chewing_Gum_Lose_Its..., but the issue is marked 'dubious'.
There's a guy called 'Captain Disillusion' or something like that who makes these amazing shows about visual effects that remind me of some of the scientific programming on CBC when I was younger. Why don't they pick him up? His 1-man show is better than most of their expensive content.
He can get a fat cheque, with a big production team and set his own terms if he's in a position to do it.
Or - he can literally make the same stuff, but have it under BBC terms.
I feel there is something better than YouTube for these types of shows.
I think the jump between TT/YT and broadcast is too big.
Assuming they are making good money, I really don't see an upside to moving the show to broadcast television.
When a network backs you, the advertising, promotion, reach is substantial.
Just because someone is on YouTube and theoretically 'anyone' can see him is not actually material reach.
When you're making a BBC/Sky show, that opens up doors to significantly more places, whereas today he's just 'some youtuber' which is nice, but it's not big.
And of course follow on deals and residuals.
For example: he gets booked on the Talk Show circuit, BBC interview circuit, his profile is raised. He maybe can get access to CERN, or the Moscow Ballet or whatever, things like that.
The various auto enthusiast shows from the UK are massive. Those hosts make a lot of money.
Though I completely agree with what you are saying as whole, being picked up for television could be a bad thing for content creator. If they can manage an audience and can work out ways to monetize not just on Ad revenue that can be a lot better in the long run.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO3JgPUJ6iQ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=807rSw8wyGA
I wish more people would be so aware of their own flaws and foibles.
Is there a text equivalent of this video? A bunch of sources are listed under the video, but none is an overview.
At times in my local paper the small print stating a story is paid placement is easily overlooked but these stories tend to only occur on weekends
However we have to admit that product placement in some movies and television shows has approached meme quality to where the products were more talked about than the show they were on.
On a side note, a friend who does stream on twitch has to be explicit when being paid to play a game or even given a free key. they also prevent give away contest from being limited to subscribers.
Earlier search engines didn't mark results that had paid to rank higher.
Regulators across the world weren't paying attention to the internet at the time. I'm sure if Google decided to remove that word "Ad", regulators would start paying attention.
I also find Tom Scott's videos highly well presented and produced but they lack the same level of quality when it comes to the concepts discussed in them.