Jay Leno (America’s 2009 favorite TV personality) has two jobs. He’s a show host and a salesman. First off, I’m not American and I don’t watch US talk shows often. I was, however, watching Leno a couple of days ago and I was stunned by how strongly his show smells (stinks?) of advertising.
For those of you who don’t know it, it’s a classic combination of stand-up comedy, a couple of short talks with celebrities, some music and funny clips. The usual. But there’s more to it. There’s a segment called Amazon worst sellers. Where the host shows a series of Amazon bestselling products (DVDs, books, toys, etc.) and then some parody products that would be “worst-sellers”. It’s quite watchable (for the most part), but it’s also a quasi Amazon commercial.
Next, there was a talk with Penelope Cruz, which (as usual) was in reality nothing more than ad for her upcoming movie. The talk was followed by a live music performance introduced by showing the new CD the song comes from.
To make things complete, there was a final segment that talked about Superbowl. Not about football. About the SB ads. The whole segment was devoted to a winning ad for Doritos (ironically advertised by Leno himself two decades ago).
This is not a moral outburst. It’s just an observation. I was writing about research on ad breaks a few weeks ago. Leno got me questioning the division between ad and TV show. The dilemma is not new (it’s happening all over), but the degree of execution is still amazing. This show was practically an ad. It was about ads, it was because of ads. In some weird manner: it all ads.
It certainly smells like advertising project. If it wasn’t meant as such at the beginig, at the moment seems like it.
On the other hand I believe that people are bored of traditional ways of TV advertising. It seems the most of them have negative conotation of TV commercials. I think there are two main reasons for it: lack of creativity and enormous number of broadcasted ads. So advertisers try to serve their messages in a different, more suitable way for consumers. In the way that most of consumers aren’t even aware of advertising. So this may be a pretty nice way to advertise, mereging togheter entertainment and advertising-ENTERTAISING.
By: darijan on February 24, 2009
at 4:33 pm