Marketing and entertainment have always been allies, particularly in the United States. From the beginnings of radio, then television, until today, many programmes have been produced or simply financed by major brands. In 1929, more than 55 per cent of radio programmes were financed or directly produced by advertisers or their agencies. Among the famous examples we may note, over the decades, Little Orphan Annie, sponsored on the radio by Ovaltine, General Electric Theater, The GM All-Car Showdown, Nike Training Camp and The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show [4, p.174]. For each of these sponsored programmes, the boundary between the entertainment itself and the advertising content was fragile, even nonexistent. Televised shows of this type still exist in certain countries, of which the United States is one, since the explosion in available media has generated such competition that profitability dictates that products and brands cannot always be prevented from appearing in the programmes themselves.
These shows have one considerable advantage: their length, which the infomercial sought to reestablish in the late 1980s. In the case of a sponsored show, it is possible to escape the straitjacket of the 30-second advertising spot. Not only are these few seconds of screen time expensive, but also it is sometimes difficult to make the consumer understand how a product is used, or what its benefits are, in such a short space of time. For technological goods, product placement offers the following advantage: during a film or a television series, it is possible to place a product in the hands of a character and show explicitly how it is used. For both a series and a film, it is also advantageous to be able to use the latest fashionable gadget or to benefit from the latest technological advances, sometimes even before the product has gone on sale, as was the case with the very latest Nokia mobile phone used in David R Ellis’s film Cellular in 2004 or with the telephonic video security systems designed and built by Cisco and visible in the television series [5, p.74].
In historical terms, three elements contributed to the evolution of the system of shows where the sponsor was the only advertiser. First were the manipulations of which various sponsored game shows were accused during the 1950s. Second, there was the increasing independence of the major television networks, which allowed them to group the majority of advertising discourse together in specialized commercial breaks. Third came the fact that these same networks realized that it could be much more profitable to sell spaces of 30 seconds to several advertisers in commercial breaks, rather than one or two hours exclusively to a single advertiser. The all-powerful 30-second television spot quickly became the reference of modern advertising communication, and, above all, the principal source of finance for free-to-air television channels.
