We hear a lot about the growth of online ads and that this matches the decline in traditional advertising. This theory seems to make sense to a point, (- we’ll return to this in a minute). Certainly it is important to know where advertising dollars are being spent if your day job is making those TV spots – the ones the advertisers used to spend most of their money on.

There is no doubt that there has been a massive fracturing of the typical Network audience, this is not news, but neither is it alone a problem if you do post on TV spots. More channels don’t mean less ads, in fact they no doubt mean more. The fact that a successful show on NBC now is seen by less people in absolute terms compared to 10 years ago,.. this is not actually a concern unless you own a major network.

Returning to where the money is being spent, yes there has been a large growth in online advertising, google ad/sense and the top 10 Web sites gaining most of it… there are however other huge growth areas and like on line advertising, it is not in an area that needs a lot of post-production billable hours unfortunately. I am referring to product placement and it is massively larger than I ever thought, want to guess how many product placements in America’s Next Top Model ?

An amazing 2,241, yeah that’s not a typo. Over two thousand, according to the Nielson Company. But wait ..two thousand does not even get America’s Next Top Model into the top 5 of product placements! Not even close. The winner in this category of taking money or goods in lieu to place products on screen is The Biggest Loser with a whopping 6,248 product placements. I find that number stunning – I would literally call foul but this was proudly pointed out in the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences own magazine. “Amongst the top ten shows, there were 26,000 product placements”, worth an impressive $3.5 billion last year, up more than 20% over 2007.
Thats a lot of ad money spent on TV not involving any edit suites, vfx or production budgets of any kind.