Television viewers old enough to remember Texaco Star Theater or the Schlitz Playhouse of Stars from a few decades ago may feel a sense of deja vu this evening if they turn on the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams.
At the top of the half-hour show, an announcer will intone that it is being "brought to you with limited commercial interruption by Philips."
Usually replete with commercials, the newscast will have just one sponsor, the electronics giant Philips, which will run three ads totaling a mere one minute and 15 seconds - a far cry from the 14 spots that typically take up about seven minutes of Nightly News air time. Monday, the show will instead offer at least two longer news stories, each running about four minutes.
NBC's move, which was inspired by a similar deal a year ago between Philips and CBS News for a broadcast of 60 Minutes, is part of an increasingly visible trend toward so-called branded entertainment, a newfangled term for something that was done frequently in the early days of radio and television.
The trend is being driven primarily by advertisers' fear that, with gadgets like TiVo that enable viewers to zip past commercials, audiences are tuning ads out, severely lessening their impact. The thinking is that with branded shows and fewer commercials, audiences will be more tolerant of pitches and the occasional interruption.
"People have many more choices," said John R. Kelly, senior vice president for network news advertising at NBC. "This is a way to stand out from the crowd. With this campaign, Philips feels that by offering less they're getting more."
As far back as 2002, Ford Motor Co. sponsored the premiere of the second season of Fox's hit drama 24, which was shown without commercial breaks.
We may not see Taco Bell's Grey's Anatomy any time soon, said Ed Robertson, an author, pop-culture critic and television historian, referring to the trend of putting corporate sponsors' names on, say, sports stadiums.
Alternative platforms
But the enormous increase in alternative platforms for programs, which can now be accessed through cell phones, iPods and other hand-held devices, means that advertisers and television producers need to radically alter their thinking.
"More and more people are watching shows without actually owning a TV," Robertson said from his office in Visalia, Calif. "Between MySpace.com and logging onto network sites like ABC.com, it is entirely possible to watch shows and viral videos with no set. If that trend continues, and if you're an advertiser, it certainly makes sense to go back to the old model."
That "old model" of single-brand sponsorship harks back to the days when watching television was an event, Robertson said, because far fewer people had one and it was still considered a novelty. In many instances, advertisers had creative control over programs and sometimes threatened to pull their sponsorship if their demands on hiring or content were not met.
While no such control is being ceded these days to advertisers who choose to be the sole sponsor of a show, some companies have teamed up with their advertising agencies to create TV programs, films and online shows. Some cable networks have run such programs in recent months, including TNT, MTV, TLC and ABC Family, whose show Schooled was created by Office Max, a retailer of workplace supplies and furniture.
Robertson predicted that advertisers' logos will be placed in a corner of TV screens during certain shows in much the same way that network or channel logos often appear now. "That's the next logical step," he said.
Puneet Manchanda, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, said advertisers are rushing to adapt to technological advances.
"The relationships between advertisers and consumers is changing from a one-way communication - in which we tell you what we have, why it's good for you and why you should consider it - to a two-way communication, where consumers are having some control over how they receive the communication and how they provide feedback to the advertisers," he said.
Manchanda, who studies the effect of advertising on consumer behavior, said branded programs are a good first step in improving the relationship between advertisers and consumers, many of whom are fed up with commercials.
"It's a richer and more memorable form of communication," he said. "If I want to watch Desperate Housewives and it's sponsored by, say, Colgate, and I know that upfront, then it helps me to build a relationship with Colgate because I'm not annoyed by their ads."
However, Manchanda added, not everyone is irritated by commercials. Quite the contrary, he said: Some people like them. Web sites and blogs are given over to the likes and dislikes of advertising fans.
Besides, he said, TiVo owners' much-vaunted ability to forward through ads is less significant than it seems, given studies that show that many of the ads still register on viewers' consciousness, if only fleetingly.
"TV advertising is more resilient than anticipated," the media-buying agency Starcom said in a report this year. "The fact is, people don't actively dislike TV ads - they just often prefer to watch their favourite programs uninterrupted by program breaks. Ads themselves are not the problem and, in fact, viewers are clearly still browsing commercial content; they are just more able to control and limit when they do so."
TiVo'd ads
The studies' results have prompted television networks to urge Nielsen Media Research, which conducts ratings surveys, to include TiVo'd ads in their audience measurements.
"The pressure is on Nielsen to try to provide some empirical evidence that the ads still count," Manchanda said.
Under particular threat in the new age of branded entertainment is the 30-second commercial, although television executives are being careful to point out that there is still room on their media for such ads.
"The 30-second is not going away," said Linda Yaccarino, executive vice president of Turner Entertainment advertising sales and marketing. "We are just creating opportunities for our advertising partners to thread their message through the right channels. For some partners, branded entertainment works; for others, video on demand or broadband may serve as a better messaging tool."
Last week, Turner's TBS cable network premiered a sitcom called My Boys in partnership with the online dating service Match.com, which will be the sole sponsor of the series. My Boys, about a young Chicago reporter's travails on the dating scene, is being promoted as "sponsored by Match.com" and will feature the Web site in some of its episodes.
In turn, Match.com will promote My Boys on its site and in 18 million e-mails sent to Match.com members every month.
John Moore, a senior vice president at MediaHUB, a division of the advertising agency Mullen, which set up the Match.com deal with My Boys, said it was exciting to marry the Web site to "a media property that so perfectly aligns with this brand's target, mission and personality."
Such deals are becoming increasingly common as advertisers, already spending millions on product placement, seek new ways to make their messages stick - not only on television, but on the Internet, where national companies are ramping up advertising and creating their own content.
The trend is well established in Britain. This year, according to BBC News, consumer products giant Unilever was heavily involved with the production of Sure Fans United, a TV series that promoted a deodorant brand while looking at the antics of football fans in the run-up to the World Cup.
Single-sponsor advertising has even reached magazines. The Aug. 22 issue of The New Yorker had just one advertiser, the retailer Target, which filled every ad space in the issue with images produced by well-known illustrators.
At NBC, the deal with Philips will be visible on Nightly News for just one night but will be evident for the whole week elsewhere on the network, including the Today show, as well as on CNBC, MSNBC and at MSNBC.com. The Web site will solicit viewer feedback throughout the week about the Nightly News broadcast.
The network's executives also will be considering it.
"It's a win for the viewers, and it works for us because it enables us to do stories we wouldn't otherwise be able to do," said John Reiss, executive producer of Nightly News. "We'll look at it on Tuesday and ask ourselves, 'How did it go?'"
nick.madigan@baltsun.com
"NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams," 6:30 p.m., WBAL, Channel 11.