Much Ado About Coffee Cups On Newsdesks

Some time ago, I noticed a Starbucks coffee cup in front of a news anchor for MSNBC and wondered if it was a casual mistake or paid placement.

Now comes word that McDonalds is, in fact, paying to have their coffee cups displayed in front of news anchors:

“The Las Vegas Sun reported last week that Meredith-owned KVVU, a Fox affiliate, placed cups of McDonald’s iced coffee on the anchor desk during the morning show in recent weeks. The New York Times reported that other Meredith-owned stations across the country have also been accepting product placements during morning programming.” (via)

This has caused much noise in the blog-o-sphere about whether or not this violates the perceived “church and state” separation between news and advertising.

For better or for worse, that barrier fell ages ago and whether or not advertisers get cups in front of anchors is pretty meaningless at this point.  Besides, go to CNN.com or any other news website and the news is surrounded by various forms of advertising.  How is that product placement any different?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Product placement in Las Vegas newscast
• Fox TV news anchors enjoy plastic coffee
• McDonald’s brings product placement to US TV news
• Newsreaders Present With McCoffee

1 Comment

• 

  By Greg Stielstra, July 24, 2008 @ 7:26 pm

  Take a look at this product placement for Dell in CSI. When they decided you couldn’t see the logo well enough, they put a magnifying glass in front of it. Unbelievable!

  http://pyromarketing.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/05/did-dell-pay-to.html

  GS

Other Links to this Post

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment