Reality Bites Back

A neon Wal-Mart sign glows conspicuously behind America’s Next Top Model judge Nigel Barker and his wife, CoverGirl spokeswoman Chrissy Barker. Ten lithe young women are gathered outside the megastore, the set for this episode’s competition. “You are going to be racing through the One-Stop-Shop CoverGirl Challenge,” Chrissy announces. “You’ll have to race through different departments within Wal-Mart to create that model basic look,” Nigel explains. “You’re gonna hit clothes, you’re gonna hit shoes, you’re gonna hit makeup,” he narrates, as ANTM’s cameras pan through Wal-Mart aisles and rest on in-store ads, rollback sale signs, and constant close-ups of sponsors’ apparel and cosmetics. “The girl who puts her look together best of all will win.”

In this climate, what viewers want will always take a back seat to what multinationals such as the Big Six media owners (Disney, News Corp, Time Warner, General Electric, Viacom, and CBS) can convince us to watch.^fe TV shows live or die in today’s media market based not on pure-and-simple ratings, but on demographics (which viewers are watching, in relation to age, race, gender, and income bracket, not just how many overall) and broader economic factors, including the cost to produce a program versus the amount of profit it generates.

The key to media profits is advertising, a $200 billion annual industry.³ In the last decade, TV companies’ ad revenue has come not only from traditional commercials between, but increasingly from product placements within, the content of our favorite shows. Embedded sponsorship has been a particular windfall for cable, which operates under a subscription model and is therefore seen as an “ad-free” medium.^ff

Corporate sponsors have long lorded their lucre over TV networks to promote programs that advance their values, and regularly withhold ad buys to squelch content they deem controversial (or material geared toward the nonwhite, low-income, or aging demographics they consider undesirable).⁴ This has been partly responsible for the ongoing whitewashing of prime-time network television. Back when sitcoms and dramas ruled, Extra! magazine’s Janine Jackson documented the way advertisers’ racial prejudice resulted in the sidelining of actors of color in 1990s scripted programs. “Advertisers pay less for programs that garner non-white audiences, in a widely acknowledged policy called ‘discounting.’ Some flatly refuse to buy ads on stations or shows that reach primarily non-white audiences, the so-called ‘no urban/no Spanish dictate,’” Jackson wrote.^fg Ten years later, advertisers’ bias against multiracial casting continues to play out in the reality genre, as the lily-white Bachelor/Bachelorette franchise attests.

Standard commercials are still an important revenue stream for network TV. When the people and the homes on reality shows resemble wealthy, white gated communities, chalk it up to advertisers like Toyota, whose marketing manager explained in 2003 that they were buying time during The Bachelor and The Bachelorette because “We’re definitely looking for upper middle-class content—more like The Bachelor.” That same year, McDonald’s, Visa, Pfizer, the U.S. Army, and at least ten other advertisers spent an average of $210,000 each for thirty-second spots during the first month’s episodes of Joe Millionaire. Many of these major corporations were telling journalists that they wouldn’t advertise on programs such as Fear Factor, because they considered “contestants eating ‘horse rectum’” offensive. They had no problem running their ads on shows that treated women like subservient losers and greedy gold diggers, though—apparently that was just considered good business practice.⁶

Where traditional commercials allowed advertisers to sway program content through veiled financial blackmail, the new economic model of reality television handed them the holy grail. Today, to combat cable-channel proliferation and technologies like DVRs, media companies wooing ad dollars are encouraging a rapid disintegration of borders between marketing and editorial. With “brand integration,” advertisers no longer have to rely on threats—or even program breaks—to make their desired impact. Instead, they are weaving their products directly into the fabric of popular unscripted shows, where not even the most careful TiVo jockey can fast-forward through them. Sometimes marketers pay millions for the privilege; other times they simply deliver goods and services (like luxury resort accommodations on dating shows) gratis. Either way, companies get their brands displayed while prop managers, costumers, set designers, and travel coordinators get free supplies, reducing overall production costs. And then there’s cross-promotion: Advertisers attempt to cash in on the entertainment vehicle’s cachet by using its celebrities, clips, and themes in marketing campaigns for their own products, and they use their own ad budgets to hype the show. This value-added promotion expands both advertisers’ sales and ratings success for networks.

Product placement used to be mostly limited to subtle (or blatant) dressing of characters and scenery with recognizable brands. And sure, shots of sponsors’ goods are ubiquitous on almost all reality shows, from The Bachelor’s fridge full of Pepsi and the GE appliances on Top Chef to the close-ups of name-brand picture phones used by aspiring American Idols and Biggest Losers. CoverGirl, Steve Madden, La Perla, and Ethan Allen have had deals to dress the faces, the feet, the boobs, and the sets of America’s Next Top Model, where young women are berated for being too fat, too skinny, too short, too tall, too aggressive, too timid, too prudish, too “hootchie,” too “ghetto,” and my personal favorite, for sounding too smart when they speak. Offensive? Yep . . . but entirely typical of the way fashion and beauty advertisers have always portrayed women.

This starts early. Eight “young black elite” friends in Manhattan “swish Listerine, treat their allergies with Zyrtec, and sweeten their coffee with Splenda” on Harlem Heights, the result of a partnership between BET and Johnson & Johnson. ⁷ Long before filming began, participants were surveyed about their health and wellness habits, so that it would seem like the company’s mouthwash, medical products, and sweeteners, along with their Ambi skin creams and Purell hand sanitizer, were just “part of their daily process.”^fh Producers told The New York Times that “we would come on the set with boxes and we would place things within the scenes, while trying to make it as organic as possible.” Other times, visual endorsements are so jarring that they can disrupt the momentum of a show’s (and I use this word lightly) storytelling. When women in their forties on NBC’s Age of Love are shown using Downy Simple Pleasures Fabric Softener to do their laundry (because that’s what “cougars” do when they’re tired of chasing beefcake prey, right?), the camera zooms in on a detergent bottle placed next to a stove. The very next second a woman is shown opening a washing machine door in an entirely different room. Oopsy . . . shilling is a little more important than “reality,” ain’t it?

Conspicuously brand-conscious camera work is just the first layer. The second is dialogue. As we’ve seen, advertisers infiltrate climactic reality moments. Bachelors propose by telling their Bachelorettes “that this Tacori diamond ring symbolizes forever.” Fashion adviser Tim Gunn tells Project Runway contestants to “use the Banana Republic [later Bluefly.com] accessory wall” and “go down to the L’Oréal hair and makeup studio” right before they hit the runway. Top Model ingenues mouth advertisers’ slogans every episode—sometimes while nude. (Psst! Wanna see someone’s side-boob again? Pinup pics are available in the “CoverGirl Close Up” gallery on the CW’s website.) Such sound bites are hardly natural. When a runway challenge was staged at a Kmart store rather than at some high-fashion locale, ANTM ’s contestants were confused and annoyed. Their distaste was edited out. The Writers Guild reports, “Kmart only allowed a comment like, ‘What are we doing at Kmart?’ if it was followed up by ‘That’s OK, I shop here all the time.’”⁸

The third level of integration: plot. Every season of ANTM includes one or more episodes in which contestants must act in a CoverGirl commercial; just one of these can feature forty verbal and twenty-two visual endorsements. We listen as they rehearse lines about the many merits of “LashBlast Mascara” and “Eye Enhancer Blast Collection Shadows” and watch them perform as spokesmodels in would-be TV ads. Then we see those ads again, as judges evaluate which girl “sold it” best. When they finally bump to an official commercial break, actual CoverGirl ads appear, featuring previous ANTM winners telling us that they feel “Easy. Breezy. Beautiful.”⁹

Advertisers have paid NBC as much as $2.5 million for integration into The Apprentice, where products such as “Chrysler vehicles [are] involved from the start, as central ‘characters.’” The financials are even steeper at Fox, which reaps millions each season by making American Idol hopefuls literally do backflips over corporate logos spray painted on the floor, fake orgasms while getting “totally organic” Herbal Essences shampoos, and drive Ford Focuses in exceptionally cheesy mini music videos that viewers are encouraged to download online. By 2003, Ford and AT&T were paying $20 million for the privilege, while Coca-Cola now reportedly pays upward of $26 million annually for the Coke cups on American Idol judges’ desks, Coke-red walls, and Coke-bottle-shaped interview couch with its signature white ribbon across the back, which permeate an estimated 60 percent of the show’s airtime.¹⁰

Queer Eye for the Straight Guy’s Fab Five primped with Neutrogena tanner, Norelco nose-hair trimmers, Redken pomade, and other beauty, fashion, and interior-design products, all aggressively promoted in “shopping guides” on Bravo’s website. A What Not to Wear special blew $50K on about a dozen outfits from high-end designers like Gucci and Armani. The sales staff of bridal behemoth Kleinfeld tell Say Yes to the Dress viewers that their weddings can only be perfect with this $12K Pnina Tornai ball gown or that $17K J’Aton Couture creation. Spending a year’s salary on clothes and styling products is portrayed as a “fairytale” come true. With reality TV offering that kind of bang for their buck, advertisers assess, who needs Vogue?

Even fashion mags themselves now see reality TV as the ultimate pitching platform. On MTV’s Miss Seventeen, girls vied for an internship and a coveted spot on the teen mag’s cover (oh, and an afterthought scholarship). Seventeen editor Atoosa Rubenstein served as host. “Every editor in chief’s dream is to have a television show,” she told The New York Times. “The modern editor in chief has to see themselves as the editor in chief of a brand, with the publication one part of that brand.” That line of thought led to what the Times called “a match made in demographic heaven.” Two issues of the magazine devoted covers and editorial to MTV’s stars, while ten half-hour episodes of Miss Seventeen ran on the network, as did commercials for the publication—with revenue from the show shared between the two media properties. Seventeen’s publisher was salivating. “We’re going to have our brand exposed on MTV for two months, every day. . . . Everywhere you turn, you will see Seventeen.” Fox’s Mike Darnell may like to pretend that reality TV shows appear because “We’re giving people what they want,” but Rubenstein was far more honest: “At the end of the day, this is about branding, this is about marketing, and this is about getting to as many eyeballs as possible.”¹¹ ^fi

Many people believe that we’re currently seeing so much product placement on television because the reality format opened the floodgates.^fj As Advertising Age editor Scott Donaton writes, “Product integration could never have risen to such prominence so rapidly if TV schedules were still dominated by sitcoms and hour-long dramas . . . rather than brash reality shows with short lives and an anything goes sensibility. They make a perfect Petri dish for advertisers.”¹²

MTV’s The Real World, and Cops, a syndicated scare-fest of racial stereotypes, have been around since the 1990s. But those shows were marginal, not powerhouses. Reality TV now has its own Emmy category and, as the sidebar “Prime-Time Programming Lineup by Network ” illustrates, a significant percentage of every major network’s primetime lineup is dedicated to unscripted fare, with Fox devoting nearly half its roster to reality. (CBS seems more dedicated to fiction than the other nets: Aside from Survivor, they air nearly all their other unscripted hours during the summer.) This change occurred because networks were willing to offer a new format to sponsors, who consider brand integration a “more intrusive,” “more aggressive” way of weaseling into your psyche.^fk

It all started with Survivor, which instigated reality’s shift from cable to network TV in the summer of 2000. Now in its twentieth season, the series was a hard sell. “Skittish programmers balked” at a premise that sounded like Gilligan’s Island with the Skipper and Mary Ann eating bugs. CBS only green-lit the project after producer Mark Burnett explained that instead of paying high-priced actors and a team of union writers, advertisers would pay the network for a starring role. Burnett “envision[ed] ‘Survivor’ as a commercial vehicle as much as a TV drama,” Advertising Age noted. The adventure theme is simply a pretext for contestants to interact with brands such as Doritos, Mountain Dew, Bud Light, Saturn, and Target to the tune of more than $3.7 million each for the initial series and $12 million for the second installment. The price tag has risen exponentially each season.¹⁶

That may seem pricey, but as CBS’s sales president told Advertising Age, it was “one of the best bargains in TV history.” It’s not every day that advertisers get offered “many opportunities to have products play meaningful roles in surviving.” (Emphasis mine.) In addition to getting months of prime-time exposure to viewers, advertisers use Survivor imagery in their marketing campaigns and get added exposure from countless clips played on news and infotainment shows.¹⁷

Burnett told The Hollywood Reporter that brand integration in reality TV is “a very good business move” because “it’s a great opportunity for sponsors to have more control and networks to have less risk.”¹⁸ The philosophy was even more unabashed on another early Mark Burnett Productions series, NBC’s The Restaurant, which followed celebrity chef Rocco DiSpirito in 2003. Ben Silverman, the self-described “media synergist” responsible for ABC’s product-laced Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,^fl conceived the show. It was coproduced by Silverman’s production company, Reveille, along with Magna Global Entertainment, a branded-entertainment development wing of media giant Interpublic “dedicated to the creation of original television programming that is funded by and serves the needs of Interpublic’s clients.”

In this case, Magna clients Coors, American Express, and Mitsubishi paid between $4 and $6 million in development and advertising for story-driving presence in the food-themed reality show. NBC didn’t have to pay one dime to make or air the series—all the network had to do was save half the commercial time for the sponsors and reap cross-promotional benefits from AmEx ads starring DiSpirito. Opening credits featured an AmEx OPEN sign on the door, along with customers charging meals to their AmEx cards. DiSpirito talked shop in his Mitsubishi Endeavor, invited the bouncy Coors Twins to the restaurant’s opening, and issued stilted commands to his employees—some reportedly dubbed in by producers—such as “Don’t come back without Coors for all these people.” Looking back on his experience, Albert Davis, the restaurant’s espresso maker, said, “I will forever be trained to hold a Coors Light bottle by the neck with the label facing outwards.”¹⁹

Media scholars Robert W. McChesney and John Bellamy Foster have noted that by 2003, 80 percent of U.S. ad spending was funneled through the eight largest advertising corporations, giving companies like Interpublic “considerable ability to name their tune with corporate media firms more than willing to play ball.” For example, during a series of top-level meetings held in 2000 by USA Network, major advertisers were invited to “tell the network what type of programming content they wanted.”²¹

The question is, would anyone have missed it? More than a scripted show we could have enjoyed instead? Likewise, would MTV viewers have been worse off if they’d never been able to watch The Gamekillers, a series based on an Axe ad campaign and developed by Unilever PLC’s ad agency, in which Axe deodorant helped men “keep their cool” while trying to score with women? TV fans are still angry nine and five years after the cancellations of Firefly and Arrested Development, blogging about how much they wish the zany space Western and the biting comedy were still on the air. No one seems to remember the Coors-guzzling Restaurant, or the body-spray-touting Gamekillers.²³

In this “bold new era,” well-written TV fiction is more the exception (Mad Men, 30 Rock) than the rule. Chasing Survivor-style ratings, networks give scripted series very little time to cultivate audiences, making it hard for new shows to survive. ABC yanked Sally Field’s drama The Court, about a female Supreme Court justice, after only three episodes; they let Geena Davis serve as Commander in Chief for only one season. Networks are not only decreasing the number of slots available for quality scripted programs (which, unlike reality series, offer union writers, crew, and actors fair pay and health insurance), they’re also slashing their budgets. Once Idol was on the air for a couple of seasons, Fox tasked veteran sitcom producer Bruce Helford to create a sitcom for comedian Wanda Sykes—but, he said, only with “the lowest budget I’ve ever worked with to launch a show.” Discussing the greed that governs such programming decisions, Bernie Mac producer (and later The Daily Show contributor) Larry Wilmore told Entertainment Weekly that despite winning an Emmy and a spate of other awards in its first season, Mac was regularly preempted by Fox in favor of ratings draws like Joe Millionaire. “Now, this is an award-winning, groundbreaking show. Let alone, when was the last time a black show has been in that position?” Wilmore asked. “They don’t care. . . . They’ll pull us for whatever reality show brings that 30 share.” But as Wilmore aptly says, it’s “an unfair argument about scripted shows versus reality—it’s like asking, Why does the National Enquirer sell more copies than Scientific American?” ²⁵

Beware storytellers concerned only with commerce, who care little about art, intellect, creativity, or culture. Once in a while they may stumble on a formula that is truly engaging and even edifying, like Project Runway or The Amazing Race—but more often than not, they aren’t even attempting to entertain us. “We’re trying to create marketing platforms through television for our clients,” Riesenberg has said. “It’s not at all about making better television. We don’t profess to be able to do it better. It’s really about finding that right fit, and then integrating them into that fit” (emphasis mine).²⁶

This explains why reality TV shows position products as literally intrinsic to our survival, whether it’s a Target tent sheltering Survivor castaways from the elements or Sears giving new homes to natural disaster victims on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. Stealth advertising co-opts our emotional connections to stories, and we respond like we do to most savvy marketing gambits: by opening up our wallets. A survey by PR firm Jericho Communications found that “men were five times more likely than women to go shopping” on a Wednesday after a new Queer Eye episode aired, and respondents said they’d be most likely to purchase products endorsed by Carson Kressley, QE ’s fashion expert, than any other celebrity. The Apprentice “greatly exceeded our expectations in terms of response from consumers and retailers,” a Crest spokesperson said, after the show generated 3 million visits and 20 million page views to the toothpaste giant’s website. Beyond just prompting viewers to buy Crest Whitestrips, the show motivated big-ticket spending decisions. In an online tie-in, more than one thousand viewers preordered the Pontiac Solstice sight unseen within forty-one minutes of GM launching the car on a segment of The Apprentice.^fm ²⁷

Brilliant from a business standpoint, this model has serious implications for programming, and for our culture. Advertising is profoundly manipulative at its core. Its imagery strives to deprive us of realistic ideas about love, sex, beauty, health, money, work, and life itself, in an attempt to convince us that only products can bring us true joy. Its practitioners are trained in psychology, sociology, argumentation, poetry, and design. These are powerful tools in the art of persuasion, more so when deployed by a multibillion-dollar industry. Decades of research by analysts such as Jean Kilbourne, Robin Andersen, Anne Elizabeth Moore, and Sut Jhally have documented how advertising sees everything women have—our bodies, our minds, our fears, our dreams—as fodder to be traded, mutilated, and sold back to us for profit. As noted in chapter 2, studies show that the more ads we view, the worse we feel about ourselves.^fn This is hardly coincidental. Advertisers—especially those who target women—intentionally undermine our self-esteem to position their brands as the solution to the insecurities they’ve piqued. “Subtle manipulations can temporarily ‘shake’ one’s self-view confidence, resulting in an increased propensity of choosing self-view-bolstering products in a subsequent choice task,” advises a 2009 study in the Journal of Consumer Research, an industry trade publication.²⁸

This psychological exploitation becomes all the more insidious when woven directly into our narratives, as is happening in reality TV. The stronger the foot-hold advertisers gain over entertainment, the more power they have to define our collective values, and the more poisonous media images of women and people of color become. Reality TV’s racial typecasting, infantilizing fairytales, and hyperconsumerism—indeed, all the issues explored in Reality Bites Back—are a testament to what happens when advertisers expand the stories they tell from static print ads and thirty-second commercial breaks to feature-length programming. Using real people as their props, marketers have worked with producers to cultivate entire faux worlds based on sexist, racist ideologies. Worse, they have pretended the results are just reflecting—rather than attempting to shape—American life.

America’s Next Top Model ’s racial typecasting, glamorization of female pain and fear, and body dysmorphia are Madison Avenue staples. In the world according to CoverGirl (and Wal-Mart, Kmart, Seventeen, and a host of other sponsors), women are always on display for the gratification of others, but are not afforded control of their own sexuality or pleasure. Beauty is the key to women’s worth, but even the most gorgeous girls are fundamentally flawed. Young women are commodities, posed in La Perla panties as living mannequins in store windows. The symbolism is exceptionally clear: mannequins have no voice, no choice, no agency, no personality (and no asses—ever see those teeny plastic bods undressed? Scary!). In this universe, we’re encouraged to buy America’s Next Top Model-branded “fashion-forward clothing, bags, hats, fragrances, and room decor” exclusively at Wal-Mart, but never to question the big box chain’s reliance on sweatshop labor, its record of employment discrimination and environmental pollution, or the strain it causes to local economies.²⁹

Embedded advertising in reality TV has sociopolitical significance beyond representations of women. In the world according to Kentucky Fried Chicken, whose fast food was regularly featured on Flavor of Love, Black men are callous clowns who objectify, control, and mock Black and Latina “bitches” and “hos” while chomping on chicken wings. And in the world according to GM, Visa, and the dozens of others who’ve spent millions to make their brands “central characters” on The Apprentice, sexual harassment is fun, professionalism is optional, and business ethics are a joke. The quality of a person’s work doesn’t determine Apprentice challenge winners, the financial bottom line does, sending the message that the only thing that matters on the job is how much money you make—even if you have to lie, cheat, or commit fraud for every buck. It’s appointment TV for the likes of Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff.

This medium seeks to channel our every desire into consumer behavior. If we long for adventure, we can book a trip with Amazing Race sponsor Travelocity. If we buy into The Bachelor’s princess mythology, a “fairytale wedding” at Disney World is just a drained bank account away. And if we want to lose weight, we can stock up on The Biggest Loser-brand protein supplements, panini makers, and other goods of questionable health value.

But here’s the kicker: It’s not just advertisers who influence unscripted programming. In today’s multimerged media environment, TV networks, film studios, newspapers, and magazines are just a small sample of parent companies’ cross-holdings. Big Media corporations are also invested in industries such as travel and theme parks, insurance and financial services, sports teams and stadiums, medical technology, and aircraft, weapons, and nuclear manufacturing, to name just a few. In practical terms, this means that some reality TV content is crafted to serve the financial and ideological agendas of the owners of the networks airing the shows.

This can manifest in unscripted programming that promotes some points of view and squelches or demonizes others. Remember Profiles from the Front Line, which, as discussed in chapter 5, presented men as leaders and women in support roles and depicted Black military women in particular as mammies? It’s no coincidence that Profiles ran on Disney-owned ABC. By the time it aired in February 2003, Disney had already spent more than a year deploying ABC, ESPN, the Disney Channel, and Disney Radio to capitalize on Americans’ grief and fear after 9/11. Less than two weeks after the September 11 attacks, Michael Eisner, then Disney’s chairman and CEO, told the Orlando Sentinel that he planned an “extensive marketing campaign” that would help Americans “get back to normal” and boost his bottom line, all at the same time. “We’re going to use our own media companies to make sure the word gets out that it’s a good idea to have a good time after a period of mourning—to come to our parks, movies and buy Snow White on DVD,” Eisner said .³⁰

It also helps to explain the 2005 Wife Swap episode that framed a mom from a military family as “pro-Bush, prowar, pro-U.S.A.,” while a peace activist mom who opposed the Iraq invasion was called “antimilitary, anti-Bush, antiwar” by the narrator. Got that? On ABC’s Wife Swap, prowar equals “pro-U.S.A.,” while peace activists are, by default, anti-American. Producers lied about the antiwar family’s religion, calling them atheists in an attempt to further demonize them in comparison with the Christian promilitary family. Mina Leierwood, the antiwar mom, corrected this misrepresentation on her family’s website, writing, “It is not a crime to be an atheist, and it is good for our democracy to be able to debate issues in a civil way,” but “our family is not agnostic or atheist, we are Quakers.” This was no small oversight on the show’s part: Peace and nonviolence are core principles for Quakers, and the Leierwoods’ faith is a key component of their identity, one producers had to actively work to ignore. And just as Profiles (like ABC News) attempted to confuse viewers into erroneously believing that Iraq was responsible for the September 11 attacks, so did Wife Swap. At a peace vigil Leierwood organized for her new conservative family, her new neighbors supported the Iraq war by saying, “Do you think it was right for those people to come over and blow up the World Trade Center?” and “9/11 scared the hell out of me. If we have to go to war to get rid of people like Saddam Hussein, then by God, let’s go!” Wife Swap producers emphasized such comments to make it appear that Leierwood alone questioned U.S. involvement in Iraq. Hidden from viewers was the participation of members of Veterans for Peace, who “added tremendously to the depth of the discussion.” We didn’t hear from them because antiwar vets would have interrupted Wife Swap’s preferred narrative, that of Leierwood as a misguided idealist working against America’s best interests.³¹

Without Survivor, the reality genre may not have become a network mainstay. But behind Survivor’s long-term, landscape-shifting impact was the relentless promotion of the series by Viacom, which had recently merged with CBS and Infinity Broadcasting. Survivor wasn’t only a new format for network TV, it was also a test case for the power of the new TV/radio/billboard conglomerate. Instead of the standard one publicist per show, Survivor had six PR staffers.³² To generate buzz before the series ever aired, more than a hundred affiliate radio stations ran segments, including dozens of drive-time interviews with Burnett (which folks could listen to while driving past Viacom-owned billboards previewing the show). Sixteen of CBS’s TV stations plus Viacom’s MTV and VH1 covered Survivor’s ins and outs as if everything about the show was news. When the series started airing, Entertainment Tonight and a slew of other infotainment programs jumped on the bandwagon, interviewing booted contestants (after they had appeared on CBS’s Early Show, of course), a practice that has become de rigueur for broadcast tabloids and respected news outlets alike.^fo

If you participated in nearly any aspect of pop culture during Survivor’s first summer—even if you simply kept your eyes open while driving past billboards—it would have been very easy to believe that you were the only one who hadn’t seen Survivor, and that you’d be left out if you didn’t tune in. For several months leading up to and through its debut season, your clock radio shock jocks could wake you up joking about the hot babes in bikinis eating bugs on some upcoming TV show. At breakfast, you could watch the CBS Morning News or The Early Show discuss an exotic-sounding series where people trapped on a remote island compete for a million bucks. Then you could drive to school or work listening to a news radio host interviewing the producer of that show. At lunch, your friends might mention this new phenomenon “everyone’s talking about” and ask you if you’d seen it, or planned to watch. If you turned on the TV when you got home you might catch a segment of Access Hollywood or Entertainment Tonight playing dramatic clips with lots of mind games, drama, and (naturally) bikinis, while an enthusiastic correspondent would describe Survivor as a unique new series everyone’s talking about. When night fell, you could hear about the show yet again on CBS Evening News, 60 Minutes, 60 Minutes II, or The Late Show with David Letterman.

Thing is, “everyone” wasn’t talking about Survivor—a cacophony of Viacom /CBS/Infinity employees were. Their PR blitzkrieg made it appear as though there was overwhelming yet spontaneous popular interest in this series, and made it seem important. It worked: 15.51 million viewers checked out the premiere to see what all the fuss was about. Many viewers found it honestly entertaining, but the audience grew largely because the endless, from-all-corners buzz made viewership seem almost like a cultural imperative. That winning formula drew 51.69 million viewers to the first season’s finale—by far the most watched episode of any of Survivor’s twenty seasons to date.^fp ³³

Most of the biggest reality series, such as American Idol, have achieved their spectacular popularity by replicating Survivor’s strategy of multiplatform media attention, public relations, and product integration. A tectonic shift occurred once the networks realized they could generate boffo ratings among their preferred demos by running cheaply produced shows with lucrative back-end endorsement deals. It’s undeniable that millions of fans now adore shows like Idol, Survivor, and Amazing Race season after season. But even ignoring the chicken-and-egg question about where that interest came from, most reality shows do not perform to skyrocketing numbers. The truth is, unscripted programming carries so little financial risk that networks now often prefer likely ratings flops like Fox’s creepy, Electra-complex adoption show Who’s Your Daddy, or ABC’s (just as gross as it sounds) Conveyor Belt of Love over nurturing more-expensive scripted fare, regardless of viewers’ inclinations.

Idol is now network TV’s eight-hundred-pound gorilla, but its lesser-known precursor, Popstars, came first. The 2001 program revolved around Eden’s Crush, a marketing scheme-turned-WB show-turned-girl group created to test the power of the newly merged AOL Time Warner empire. Girls at home were encouraged to identify with the hundreds of contestants competing to become Spice Girls clones, as they were whittled down to five over several prime-time episodes. Though the show also pushed Salon Selectives hair care products, the performers themselves were the ultimate product placement. “You can’t buy that kind of advertising,” producer David Foster told the St. Petersburg Times, not acknowledging that the entire series was one long ad. Warner Music Group chairman Roger Ames saw it slightly differently, calling the WB tie-in “a huge running start” for future record sales and a “dream come true,” because “even if you could buy all the advertising in the world, there’s the difference between advertising and editorial, and this is editorial.”^fq ³⁴

The value of the media time given to the yet-unformed group was estimated to be at least $20 million. Because of the built-in fan base they imagined would result from so many hours of “editorial” exposure on the WB, Warner’s London/ Sire Records inked a recording contract before the band had a name—or even singers. Not until the songs were written, the show placed in the prime-time lineup, and the pre- and postproduction planned were the artists plugged in, like an afterthought. Once selected, Eden’s Crush appeared on WB affiliate news stations in New York and Chicago, guest-starred on the WB’s Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, were featured on the Warner Brothers-syndicated infotainment show Extra, and conducted live chats on AOL. The group’s first single sold 219,000 copies right out of the gate. Whether or not the girls in the group had any talent was irrelevant. Since the reality-show-to-mass-market formula hadn’t been perfected yet, Eden’s Crush album sales stagnated once Popstars was off the air and the girls were no longer benefiting from the illusion of popularity bestowed upon them by corporate synergy. The group folded shortly thereafter. To add insult to injury, the members of Eden’s Crush had signed away all their rights as a standard reality TV prerequisite, so they weren’t able to reap any of the profits from their short-lived success. When former Popstar Nicole Scherzinger was asked, “What did you learn from Eden’s Crush?” she replied, “After I worked my balls off for two years and didn’t make a dime?”³⁵

Scherzinger was the group’s only success story, plucked like a nearly naked phoenix from Popstars’ ashes and positioned as the lead stripp—er, lead singer—of the Pussycat Dolls, a burlesque troupe cannily recast as pop starlets known mostly for the lingerie-draped video for “Don’t Cha [wish your girlfriend was hot like me].” Like a rider on an endless celluloid merry-go-round, Scherzinger ended up back on reality TV in 2007 on the CW’s The Search for the Next Pussycat Doll, where nine fishnetted babes vamped against stripper poles to display their . . . voices . . . for the chance to perform with the musical hotties and score a place on their second album. But contrary to the CW’s implication that the winner was actually going to get a lucrative music contract out of the deal, that was not to be. The show was a joint production of Ken Mok’s 10x10 Entertainment (one of the producers of America’s Next Top Model ), and Interscope A&M Records, the label that owns the Pussycat Dolls. Under a unique arrangement, each performer is a salaried (and thereby completely interchangeable) employee of Interscope, allowing the company total control over the Dolls’ income, their image, and every financial and creative move they make, including CD sales, videos, websites, touring, and merchandise (like the Pussycats’ own line of “bustiers are for babies, too!” dolls by Hasbro for their tween fans). From Popstars in 2001 to The Search for the Next Pussycat Doll in 2007, these shows pretended their talent competition prizes were guaranteed windfalls. The truth is that reality TV music and modeling franchises function much like the sex industry. Like most sex workers, the Dolls get a tiny fraction of the cash their bodies generate, while their pimps—the former WB, Interscope, 10x10 Entertainment, the CW network, and embedded sponsors like Secret deodorant—control the profits generated by their gyrations. The workers are undervalued and treated as interchangeable.

Though Popstars fizzled (as did the CW’s Pussycat copycat) it provided, along with Survivor, a marketing template Fox built upon to completely dominate TV for the bulk of the ’00s. By the time Fox rolled out the more compelling American Idol in 2002, the infotainment circuit was primed by several seasons of reality hype. Idol gossip, ear-curdling audition outtakes, and mean-spirited judges’ rebukes ran seemingly at every hour, for months—and not only on Fox. Hundreds of kids were humiliated, insta-celebrity was bestowed upon several nominally talented contestants, and millions of home viewers subscribed to AT&T Wireless to vote for their favorite singer. Eventual winner Kelly Clarkson, an aw-shucks girl with a powerhouse voice, appeared pretty much everywhere. All that cross-promotion guaranteed ratings gold for Fox and an astonishing debut for Clarkson’s single, which broke the Beatles’ record for fastest-ever rise to number one on the Billboard charts. “I was like, ‘How did that happen?’” Clarkson exclaimed, a bit dazed, on an Idol reunion show.^fr

It didn’t take five years. Numbed by advertiser-created or supported reality shows like Survivor and The Restaurant, we began to overlook such intrusions in scripted programming as well. By 2007, viewers of The Starter Wife didn’t think twice when they watched Molly, a divorcée played by Debra Messing, use Ponds “Age Def EYE” and “Time Rewind” creams to quell her fears of wrinkle-induced lovelessness. In exchange for sponsorship of the USA Network miniseries, Ponds got a seat in the writer’s room, ensuring them “1) a hand in shaping the story and character arcs; 2) some standard product placement; and 3) a few key ‘signature moments’ in which an on-screen interaction with the Pond’s brand triggers a thought or motivation in a character.” No wonder we were treated to campy, noiresque fantasy sequences in which detectives grill Molly about what an old, unattractive loser she is. Is it too much to ask, she cries, for someone to return the romantic effort she puts out there? “With those bags under your eyes?!” one private dick snaps, while his buddy shines the bad-guy spotlight in her grimacing face. Molly snaps out of the fantasy and obsessively pats her puffy eyes with Ponds crème to help forestall rejection for another day.³⁸

Even writers of successful, widely respected series have been ordered to change story arcs to accommodate integrated sponsors, as NBC forced The Office to do for Staples, Sandals Resorts, HP, Apple, Cisco Systems, Gateway, and Hooters, among others. This is a major thorn in the side of the Writers Guild of America, which has filed comments with the FCC protesting the impediment product placement imposes on their jobs.^fs

If such trends continue unabated, entertainment crafted around commercial messages could largely replace traditional narrative. Media insiders say the future of scripted television is an immediate, interactive model in which viewers will be able to instantly purchase products they see on their favorite shows. Eric Yaverbaum, president of the firm that conducted the Queer Eye shopping survey, told me that he predicts “a scrolling ticker at the bottom of every show. It’ll be like this: You like the bed Frasier’s sleeping in? Buy it at X furniture store.”⁴⁰

We’ve seen what “reality” looks like in the world according to CoverGirl, Coke, and KFC. Now imagine everything we watch on TV conforming to these regressive, hypercommercialist values. What little diversity exists in media will only decrease. One-look-fits-all casting will worsen, as will the homogeneity and vapidity of storylines. Considering how steadfastly fashion advertisers cling to young anorexics as the female ideal, average-size and older actresses will find it even harder to score roles once shows are literally designed to sell clothes off characters’ backs. Let’s say Pottery Barn creates a family drama that revolves around a set full of their furniture: What are the chances that abortion or racial profiling would be discussed by characters whose main function is to showcase a trendy couch? Dozens of years and mergers ago, television occasionally gave difficult social issues the dramatic treatment they deserved.^ft But a groundbreaking miniseries like Roots wouldn’t happen in the TV future Yaverbaum imagines, since advertisers aren’t interested in the horror of slave owners branding human beings—they’re only interested in positive branding opportunities.

As advertisers seek more direct control over media content than they had even in 1930s radio and 1950s TV (when soap operas actually sold soap to housewives and a character on Fibber McGee and Molly was an S.C. Johnson Wax salesman), product placement apologists claim critics are misguided Chicken Littles, fearing falling sky where no real danger exists. Today’s real-life Don Drapers⁺ say we needn’t worry our pretty little heads about ads populating our programs because TV is simply returning to media’s golden age. Since branded entertainment wasn’t so bad back then, they ask, what real harm could it possibly pose today?

Though seductive, this argument is factually specious and historically unsophisticated. Take tobacco advertising, which contributed to widespread health problems among the TV-watching and moviegoing population during those “simpler days” when the Marlboro Man was a trusted friend. Eventually, this issue came to be seen as a threat to media and democracy.^fu “Following the quiz show scandals of 1959, Congressional and FCC hearings revealed sponsor-control of TV content verging on censorship,” writes FIT Media Coalition organizer Nancy Marsden. “Networks evicted advertising from program content and held the ethical line for more than three decades. That was the real Golden Age of television.”⁴¹

Advertiser-controlled content is more threatening today than at any prior point because of the sheer breadth and inescapable power of our modern mediated landscape. Yesteryear’s viewers could turn off “their stories” if they were annoyed by silly soap jingles. Today, it’s nearly impossible to tune out the commercials woven into not just reality TV shows, but also blockbuster films, music and talk-radio programs, magazine and newspaper “advertorials,” VNRs (public relations videos packaged and aired as impartial journalism) on TV news, websites, social media networks, video games, children’s classrooms,^fv and outdoor ads that pervade public spaces.⁴²

Women bear an undue burden from this mercenary approach, especially in reality television. Fox’s Mike Darnell wasn’t kidding when he told Entertainment Weekly that he’d love to do a reality show with female prisoners in a beauty pageant. Something similar aired in Lithuania, he said, and he thought it would do gangbusters in America: “You give them a chance to get a makeover, and it’s a 40-share special!”⁴⁵ Since nothing is too mercenary in the media era Darnell has helped to usher in, any number of brand integration opportunities could be written into that sort of exploitative stunt. Corporations that replace salaried workers with captive prison labor could reposition their brands as socially responsible businesses, rehabilitating criminals via telemarketing and product assembly skills.⁴⁶ Can you picture it? Connie Convict, an unkempt inmate who spends her day booking American Airlines reservations and bagging Starbucks espresso beans for pennies per hour, could emerge as a beauty queen . . . with a little help from some benevolent cosmetics company. I hear it now: “Maybe she found it behind bars—maybe it’s Maybelline.”

The Reality of Media Economics

“A Commercial Vehicle as Much as a TV Drama”

“It’s Not at All about Making Better Television”

Creating the Illusion of Public Demand

Ad Creep Just Gets Creepier . . .