UK product placement consultation launched

By Mark Sweney

On-screen alcohol and junk food plugs may be restricted if product placement is allowed on television

The government has launched a consultation looking at how product placement could work on UK television, with a view to restricting the promotion of alcohol, junk food and gambling.

The culture secretary, Ben Bradshaw, said the move, which confirms a U-turn on the government's previous position, was recognition that the beleaguered broadcast industry should "not suffer through being overly strictly regulated".

Ofcom has estimated that within five years of it launching, product placement could make UK broadcasters as a whole £25m to £35m a year.

The consultation is calling for responses on whether to ban or restrict placement of products from the alcohol and gambling industries as well as food high in fat, salt and sugar.

In addition it is looking at whether there should be a "specific prohibition" of product placement in religious programmes, current affairs and consumer shows.

The overarching European Audiovisual Media Services directive already bans product placement in children's TV . However, the UK is looking at whether the ban should extend to programmes that have a high proportion of younger viewers. This would tie in with Ofcom's

"Index 120" rule that blocks junk food being advertised in shows of "particular appeal" to under-16s.

The government said that it was reconsidering its former position, adopted by former culture secretary Andy Burnham, of a total ban.

"There is no doubt that commercial broadcasters are suffering in this challenging economic climate," said Bradshaw. "Programme-makers have argued that our current stance on product placement will put them at a competitive disadvantage against international rivals, particularly from the US".

Bradshaw said if product placement was allowed it would be with "adequate safeguards to address concerns that relaxing the rules will threaten the trust of viewers and the integrity of programming".

The consultation will close on 8 January.

Lady Gaga's product placement Opus

By Maxine Shen

Say what you will about Lady Gaga, but there's one thing you can't argue with: The girl knows how to work a visual.

It's been a very long time since I've seen a music video that is as visually striking as Lady Gaga's new clip for her song "Bad Romance." So long, that I can't even remember what the last video might have been.

I'm starting to think that the weird outfits she shows up to events in are nothing more than early promotions for her upcoming music videos. Par example, those who saw her red crown-veil outfit at the MTV VMAs in September, will see similarities in the black and white outfits she wears in this video. Also, the polar bear coat is genius.

As for the song itself, I like it. A lot. But then again, I've always been a sucker for a Lady Gaga tune...and electronic harpsichord intros and outros.

Check out the video below. While you're at it, see if you can spot all the product placements. I counted five. Which has got to be a record, right?

See The Video

5000 Feature Films

by Connie Larson ( Copied From Brand Builders Website)

Novemer 18th was the 5000th feature film submitted to Feature This!

Feature This! started on Jay May's daughters school desk in his dining room on the second floor of a four plex in Beverly Hills. Jay said " I remember when production had to return an item and would see stairs they would shake their heads". Jays two bedroom apartment started to grow with products, "my living room became our warehouse" he chuckled. Once he ran out of room in our home, Feature This! had their first office in Hollywood right next to a prop house.

This was very clever of Jay because he was a propmaster for 22 years on (Features like "TeenWolf", Pumkinhead") " when I had nothing to do I would just walk 400 feet and visit his friends and say, "what are you working on"? Then he added "I have the perfect product for your show" The Prop house Ellis Mercantile"

Ellis Mercantile" Started as a Pawn Shop by Ellis Zemanski in 1902. due to failing profits combined with runaway production concerns. There are rumors that George Reeves ( Television's "Superman" shot himself with an Ellis prop gun)


Here are just a small handful of movies FT! had a hand in.

The New office was really a one bedroom apartment that was owned by actress Jule Newmar from the original "Batwoman". "I will never forget when Julie walked us ( La Wanna May co-founder ) through the apartment, she was still very beautiful, she was at least six feet tall" says Jay. The only issue was, I didn't learn a lesson because, once again there were stairs, productions where not happy campers", he chuckles. Once again Feature This! outgrew their space and finally moved to a ground floor building on Venice Blvd next to MGM and 20th Century Fox. Jay and La Wanna figured this is where we can grow. That was an understatement within the first year that facility was already too small. They ended up having to rent storage places to store the products because they had a five year lease. When that lease was over they finally landed in Burbank between Warner Bros, Universal, Disney and Nickelodeon. " my people can get to any of those studios in under five minutes" said Jay. Presently Feature This! is working on over 45 Future Blockbusters like Marvel Comics "Thor" or "A-Team at 2oth. Feature This! also works on most network and syndicated shows like "24", "The Office" as well game shows "Wheel Of Fortune", "Lets Make a Deal" and most talk shows like "Ellen or Letterman"; and reality shows such as "The Biggest Losers"

Today they are very comfortable in our own building with 8 offices, an editing room, loading docks and warehouse. Propmasters, Producers, Set dressers even Directors go through Feature This! everyday. "Jay provided a great service to productions. We have very restricted budgets and jays company really helps me defer substantial costs" Said Scott Rosenfelt producer of "Home Alone" and discovered Julia Roberts in "Mystic Pizza"

Feature This! has become part of movie history....
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TV Game Shows Looking for Products

Because the economy is so bad, the Game Shows and Talk Shows need Corporate Brands for prizes In most cases there are no fees and the brand will have a 10 second on air promotion

Prizes for some shows could be as low as $100

Appeal of TV Game Shows
The cultural influence of the TV Game Show has generated much popularity of the last sixty years; mainly due to it's audience response in viewing. Millions of people love to watch their favorite shows in day or night time. The first shows, which began in the 1940's, vary in great detail from the production and glamour of today's technology. Contestants now can interact with websites, play the games online and use special devices to pre-record each episode. Still, the biggest differences of our modern game shows and those of the past is how the games are played and how much the winners are paid. Along with their charming hosts and long time running history.

The first TV Game Show was the Quiz Show, adapted form a Radio Show called The $64.00 Question. The Quiz Show became a popular show, by offering prize money to those contestants that gave the right answer to the trivia questions. This show began in early television and had the sponsors appear on the show to promote their company's products. This show did not stay on-the-air as long as it was expected to. It was discovered that the players of the game already knew the answers, and were paid to play, this became The Quiz Show Scandal. It was this great circus of events which inspired the intervention of a law body to restructure guiding rulings over the fairness of games being played in media circuits for a return amount of pay for winners. This entire elaborate involvement made history. More can be learned about The Quiz Show Scandal from seeking the website of Encyclopedia Britannica, under this title.

International Green Globe Film Awards

Akira Kurosawa was the youngest of seven children, born in Tokyo on 23 March 1910. He has said that the first important influence in his life was a teacher called Tachikawa, who was progressive in his emphasis on art education for the young. This was how the young Kurosawa was
introduced to art and film.

A talented painter, he enrolled in an art school that emphasized Western styles. Around this time he also joined an artists' group with a great enthusiasm for nineteenth-century Russian literature, with Dostoevsky a particular favorite. Another influence was Heigo, one of his brothers, who loved film and worked as a benshi, a film narrator/commentator for foreign silent films. His suicide deeply affected the director's sensibilities.

In 1930 he responded to a newspaper advertisement for assistant directors at a film studio and began assisting Kajiro Yamamoto, who liked the fact he knew 'a lot about things other than movies'. Within five years he was writing scripts and directing whole sequences for Yamamoto films. In 1943 he made his debut as a director with Judo Saga (Sanshiro Sugata), with a magnificent martial-arts sequence in which two masters fight to the death in a wind-swept field, their flying limbs all but obscured by the tall swaying grasses. Consider the acclaim given to the similar fight sequences in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and it's obvious why in 1943 people began to talk about a young film-maker with a brilliant future.

His early films were produced during the Second World War, so had to comply to themes prescribed by official state propaganda policy. It was Drunken Angel which was Kurosawa's first personally expressive work, made in 1948 and featuring Toshiro Mifune who became Kurosawa's favorite leading man. The director has noted "In this picture I finally discovered myself".

For those who discover Kurosawa, they will find a master technician and stylist, with a deep humanism and compassion for his characters and an awe of the enormity of nature. He awakened the West to Japanese cinema with Rashomon, which won the top prize in the Venice Film Festival of 1951, and also a special Oscar for best foreign film. A golden period followed, with the West enthralled by his work. Seven Samurai was remade in the US under its alternative title The Magnificent Seven and the lone samurai hero Yojimbo was the inspiration for Clint Eastwood's man with no name persona, most obviously in A Fistful of Dollars. The intercultural influence was reciprocal. Kurosawa's fondness for Hollywood westerns in the John Ford tradition is seen in the epic sweep of Hidden Fortress, an award-winning film that inspired George Lucas to lift the plot for Star Wars. His love of literature also surfaced in two superb interpretations of Shakespeare (Macbeth in Throne of Blood and King Lear in Ran) and versions of Gorky's The Lower Depths and The Idiot by Dostoevsky.

Following Red Beard (Akahige) in 1965 he entered a frustrating period of aborted projects and forced inactivity and when in 1970 his first film in five years (Dodeska-den) failed at the box office, he attempted suicide. Directing a Soviet-Japanese production, Dersu Uzala helped him to recover and took four years to make. It won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1975 and a gold medal at the Moscow Film Festival.

Kurosawa won multiple awards for many of his films, notably Kagemusha (1980), a deeply humanistic historical epic, and for the blockbusting Ran (1985). A true auteur, he supervised the editing of nearly all his films and wrote or collaborated on the scripts of most. His memoirs were published in 1982, titled Something like an Autobiography.

In 1989 he won an Oscar for Lifetime Achievement. At the age of 72 he said "I like unformed characters. This may be because, no matter how old I get, I am still unformed myself." Kurosawa died in 1998.

Source: British Film Institute (BFI)