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Netflix puts the ads directly inside the shows they control themselves. This way no adblock can censor them, and Netflix can prance around pretending they are

Netflix puts the ads directly inside the shows they control themselves. This way no adblock can censor them, and Netflix can prance around pretending they are saints for not showing ads. Example "Hey let's call an uber" says character A. "I watched X on netflix yesterday" says character B.

pavel_lishin 7y ago
You choose the shows your kids watch; you don't get to choose what commercials a cable/airwave channel shows you.
- throwaway66666 7y ago
  I am not saying cable is better. I am saying that netflix has a lot of hidden marketing in their shows (for adults, I don't have kids and I don' watch kids shows) that praising them for being ad-free is kinda disgenious. In the end of the day I 'd rather get a big blinking "this is an ad" banner on my ads, rather than the characters smirking on camera while drinking from a nescafe cup while waiting for an uber to arrive. Maybe those are not actual ads and the show writers just added uber and nescafe for narrative purposes, I don't know, because it doesn't tell us.
  - jimcsharp 7y ago
    >netflix has a lot of hidden marketing in their shows I really believe there's hidden cigarette marketing. Maybe directors are just taking artistic license that they can't on cable, but it just really feels like there's a noticeable increase of on-screen smoking in a lot of their originals.
    - filoleg 7y ago
      Maybe, but I honestly feel like it just coincides with the whole neo-noir and lazy-noir genre coming back, where smoking/drinking at very regular intervals throughout the day is a staple. Part of the reason I feel this way is the fact that I was never able to tell or even notice the brand of cigarettes the characters were smoking.
- tanshef22 7y ago
  For the last two decades "TV boxes" have been almost as common as TVs in households in my country. They let you record multiple things at the same time, automatically record a TV series, pause and rewind what you're watching etc. So instead of sitting through commercials people might hit record on a bunch of things they are interested in and watch them later (skipping over the commercials) or maybe even pause the TV for a short break in order to streamline the show. Personally I've never has a Smart TV so I might be behind the times using this method.
  - kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
    Many Smart TVs have buffers that allow pausing and rewind of the current channel. You can pause a show for a bit and then skip over the commercials like with a DVR.
- aczerepinski 7y ago
  On a related note I let my young kid watch Wheel of Fortune and then we get hit with “tune in to news at 11 to find out how this girl got horrifically abducted and abused 10 times.” I’m so accustomed to Netflix and it’s child controls that I totally forgot what legacy tv is like.
  - martin-adams 7y ago
    This! My dad likes to put the news on during the day when we visit and this type of thing happens all the time.
willio58 7y ago
Regular tv does this equally if not more.
tyingq 7y ago
Good point, but subtle product placement is a TON better than explicitly pushing sugary cereal as a "part of a wholesome breakfast" for 2 minutes straight.
bargl 7y ago
This is ALL over so many shows on cable TV. It hit me one day when watching bones. Two characters had a conversation about the features of their "awesome" car. I also recently saw this on "A million little things" there was an absolutely useless shot of a main character opening the trunk of the car with a foot wave. It was so over done and out of place.
- dx87 7y ago
  I think I know the exact scene you're talking about in Bones, it was a super obvious advertisement. Car starts making beeping noises "Why's the car beeping?", "Oh, it's the new lane assist feature in my Toyota Prius. It lets me know if I'm starting to drift across the lane because I'm distracted." Then they get to the destination and they show off the automatic parallell parking.
  - bargl 7y ago
    YES. Oh man it was terrible.
  - throwaway66666 7y ago
    Everything in the new Jurassic Park movies is mercedes. Even the weird sphere-car thing is made by mercedes. There is also a prominently featured starbucks in the dinosaur park. The movie is aware of how ridiculous is getting and a character says "Verizon Wireless presents The Indominus T-Rex!!!". I guess the writers took a jab at the producers and their deals. ------ But the worst was in the recent Jim Jarmusch film, where Adam Driver says "You can order it and it will arrive with free 2 day shipping". In a Jim Jarmusch film, one of the most respected "underground" movie directors of our generation!!! But his movie was funded by amazon studios so.. no surprises there. Someone should really make a "product placement in movies" hall of shame and get internet famous.
    - newman8r 7y ago
      Not exactly a hall of shame, but you might have a good time looking through https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/ProductPlacement/LiveActionFilms https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/ProductPlacement/Live...
Synaesthesia 7y ago
There’s also just the ideological content of the shows.
robbiemitchell 7y ago
I'm guessing you don't have kids and haven't actually experienced the difference. - Netflix has gobs of kids shows (i.e., cartoons) that have zero product placement, at least as far as I can tell. This includes both Netflix originals and the rest. - TV has 6-minute ad breaks every few minutes that are non-stop pitches for toys and other shows. It's unbearable. Even shows on premium networks with some product placement and mentions are 1000x better than regular cable. There's simply no comparison.
- mrguyorama 7y ago
  I literally cannot watch television anymore. Advertising is such a huge annoyance. What's worse is that it's the same five adverts played every six minutes all damn day! Meanwhile nothing actually can happen in the shows themselves since there's so little time actually devoted to it instead of revenue generating ads
  - gibspaulding 7y ago
    Same, I'm completely spoiled by ublock origin, Netflix, and Spotify Premium. Last time I killed my phone, I drove around in silence rather than listening to the radio and when Mozilla broke the extensions in Firefox a couple of weeks ago, I almost stopped using the internet altogether for a couple of days.
    - lostlogin 7y ago
      You need a Pihole in your network. It is excellent. It’s also handy for sorting out pet peeves (though does impose them on others in your network).
  - swombat 7y ago
    Sounds like the TV version of what happened to most news sites, with ads everywhere.
    - mrguyorama 7y ago
aqme28 7y ago
That's product placement and it's everywhere. Netflix might still be saving kids from 400 hours of commercials even if they have some commercials themselves.
- c0vfefe 7y ago
  I'll take two instances of product placement in an hour's programming vs. 42 min of TV with 18 min advertising.
hef19898 7y ago
Walulis, a German Youtube channel (imagine a German John Oliver for social media with a pretty solid Hitler joke per video ratio and high quality content) had a video about this. Apparently Bill Gates is a majority stakeholder in one of the companies make billions matching companies with productions. Sometimes years before the production takes place. Another example is Stranger Things and some cereal brand.
- itronitron 7y ago
  Eggo waffles >> https://strangerthings.fandom.com/wiki/Eggos https://strangerthings.fandom.com/wiki/Eggos
  - hef19898 7y ago
    The one!
- madMapper 7y ago
  "Another example is Stranger Things and some cereal brand." Obviously a less than successful product placement. /s Pretty sure it was the Eggo waffle thing you are referring to. IMO they did a pretty decent job integrating that plot-wise. Like it or not productions cost money and the people who pay those bills will always look for a way to share the load. If you don't like it prepare for $40/month Netflix.
Symbiote 7y ago
It's called product placement [1]. There are rules restricting it in the UK, which must complicate broadcasting some American TV shows. There are also companies using software to replace the branded product according to different markets — so they can rebrand that cereal box for the rerun if necessary. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_placement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_placement
ihuman 7y ago
"Is that a PS Vita? I have a console at home; I play sometimes to relax. I oughta get one of these for the car" - House of Cards
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  Yes, ruining the content itself is not better than pausing for ads.
mbrameld 7y ago
Isn't that just realistic, though? That's how dialogue in real life sounds, too. I and most people I know use "uber" as a generic term for a ride share service. We also distinguish which streaming service the show we're talking about is on if it's not already known by everybody in the conversation.
- throwaway66666 7y ago
  I see two big issues. The first one is about how well it is integrated in the show, or how "respectfully" it is done. Let's say for example... Car brands are very welcome and a must in the Fast and Furious movies. It would be pretty silly if they had fake car brands in such a movie, and the presence of real car models can excite and make the enthousiasts nerd out more about them. Overall a victory for everyone involved. But hearing how great of a family car a Volvo can be, in a movie about aliens... not so much. ------- The second is about transparency. Assuming you do not like let's say Monsanto, or Scientology and you would like to avoid works that are funded by them. Product placement is a form of guerilla marketing, noone says who they took money from. So it lacks transparency and is disgenius to the consumers. It's a bit like influencer marketing, when influencers "forget" to include the #sponsored hashtag. User ksdale has left a very nice comment on the subject.
scarface74 7y ago
I would much rather a TV show say “Let’s call an Uber” than “Let’s call a peer to peer ride sharing service”. Just like everyone says “I am going to Google that” not “I’m going to search for that”. One sounds stilted. The other sounds natural.

pavel_lishin 7y ago

You choose the shows your kids watch; you don't get to choose what commercials a cable/airwave channel shows you.

throwaway66666 7y ago
I am not saying cable is better. I am saying that netflix has a lot of hidden marketing in their shows (for adults, I don't have kids and I don' watch kids shows) that praising them for being ad-free is kinda disgenious. In the end of the day I 'd rather get a big blinking "this is an ad" banner on my ads, rather than the characters smirking on camera while drinking from a nescafe cup while waiting for an uber to arrive. Maybe those are not actual ads and the show writers just added uber and nescafe for narrative purposes, I don't know, because it doesn't tell us.
- jimcsharp 7y ago
  >netflix has a lot of hidden marketing in their shows I really believe there's hidden cigarette marketing. Maybe directors are just taking artistic license that they can't on cable, but it just really feels like there's a noticeable increase of on-screen smoking in a lot of their originals.
  - filoleg 7y ago
    Maybe, but I honestly feel like it just coincides with the whole neo-noir and lazy-noir genre coming back, where smoking/drinking at very regular intervals throughout the day is a staple. Part of the reason I feel this way is the fact that I was never able to tell or even notice the brand of cigarettes the characters were smoking.
tanshef22 7y ago
For the last two decades "TV boxes" have been almost as common as TVs in households in my country. They let you record multiple things at the same time, automatically record a TV series, pause and rewind what you're watching etc. So instead of sitting through commercials people might hit record on a bunch of things they are interested in and watch them later (skipping over the commercials) or maybe even pause the TV for a short break in order to streamline the show. Personally I've never has a Smart TV so I might be behind the times using this method.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  Many Smart TVs have buffers that allow pausing and rewind of the current channel. You can pause a show for a bit and then skip over the commercials like with a DVR.
aczerepinski 7y ago
On a related note I let my young kid watch Wheel of Fortune and then we get hit with “tune in to news at 11 to find out how this girl got horrifically abducted and abused 10 times.” I’m so accustomed to Netflix and it’s child controls that I totally forgot what legacy tv is like.
- martin-adams 7y ago
  This! My dad likes to put the news on during the day when we visit and this type of thing happens all the time.

willio58 7y ago

Regular tv does this equally if not more.

tyingq 7y ago

Good point, but subtle product placement is a TON better than explicitly pushing sugary cereal as a "part of a wholesome breakfast" for 2 minutes straight.

bargl 7y ago

This is ALL over so many shows on cable TV. It hit me one day when watching bones. Two characters had a conversation about the features of their "awesome" car. I also recently saw this on "A million little things" there was an absolutely useless shot of a main character opening the trunk of the car with a foot wave. It was so over done and out of place.

dx87 7y ago
I think I know the exact scene you're talking about in Bones, it was a super obvious advertisement. Car starts making beeping noises "Why's the car beeping?", "Oh, it's the new lane assist feature in my Toyota Prius. It lets me know if I'm starting to drift across the lane because I'm distracted." Then they get to the destination and they show off the automatic parallell parking.
- bargl 7y ago
  YES. Oh man it was terrible.
- throwaway66666 7y ago
  Everything in the new Jurassic Park movies is mercedes. Even the weird sphere-car thing is made by mercedes. There is also a prominently featured starbucks in the dinosaur park. The movie is aware of how ridiculous is getting and a character says "Verizon Wireless presents The Indominus T-Rex!!!". I guess the writers took a jab at the producers and their deals. ------ But the worst was in the recent Jim Jarmusch film, where Adam Driver says "You can order it and it will arrive with free 2 day shipping". In a Jim Jarmusch film, one of the most respected "underground" movie directors of our generation!!! But his movie was funded by amazon studios so.. no surprises there. Someone should really make a "product placement in movies" hall of shame and get internet famous.
  - newman8r 7y ago
    Not exactly a hall of shame, but you might have a good time looking through https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/ProductPlacement/LiveActionFilms https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/ProductPlacement/Live...

Synaesthesia 7y ago

There’s also just the ideological content of the shows.

robbiemitchell 7y ago

I'm guessing you don't have kids and haven't actually experienced the difference. - Netflix has gobs of kids shows (i.e., cartoons) that have zero product placement, at least as far as I can tell. This includes both Netflix originals and the rest. - TV has 6-minute ad breaks every few minutes that are non-stop pitches for toys and other shows. It's unbearable. Even shows on premium networks with some product placement and mentions are 1000x better than regular cable. There's simply no comparison.

mrguyorama 7y ago
I literally cannot watch television anymore. Advertising is such a huge annoyance. What's worse is that it's the same five adverts played every six minutes all damn day! Meanwhile nothing actually can happen in the shows themselves since there's so little time actually devoted to it instead of revenue generating ads
- gibspaulding 7y ago
  Same, I'm completely spoiled by ublock origin, Netflix, and Spotify Premium. Last time I killed my phone, I drove around in silence rather than listening to the radio and when Mozilla broke the extensions in Firefox a couple of weeks ago, I almost stopped using the internet altogether for a couple of days.
  - lostlogin 7y ago
    You need a Pihole in your network. It is excellent. It’s also handy for sorting out pet peeves (though does impose them on others in your network).
- swombat 7y ago
  Sounds like the TV version of what happened to most news sites, with ads everywhere.
  - mrguyorama 7y ago

aqme28 7y ago

That's product placement and it's everywhere. Netflix might still be saving kids from 400 hours of commercials even if they have some commercials themselves.

c0vfefe 7y ago
I'll take two instances of product placement in an hour's programming vs. 42 min of TV with 18 min advertising.

hef19898 7y ago

Walulis, a German Youtube channel (imagine a German John Oliver for social media with a pretty solid Hitler joke per video ratio and high quality content) had a video about this. Apparently Bill Gates is a majority stakeholder in one of the companies make billions matching companies with productions. Sometimes years before the production takes place. Another example is Stranger Things and some cereal brand.

itronitron 7y ago
Eggo waffles >> https://strangerthings.fandom.com/wiki/Eggos https://strangerthings.fandom.com/wiki/Eggos
- hef19898 7y ago
  The one!
madMapper 7y ago
"Another example is Stranger Things and some cereal brand." Obviously a less than successful product placement. /s Pretty sure it was the Eggo waffle thing you are referring to. IMO they did a pretty decent job integrating that plot-wise. Like it or not productions cost money and the people who pay those bills will always look for a way to share the load. If you don't like it prepare for $40/month Netflix.

Symbiote 7y ago

It's called product placement [1]. There are rules restricting it in the UK, which must complicate broadcasting some American TV shows. There are also companies using software to replace the branded product according to different markets — so they can rebrand that cereal box for the rerun if necessary. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_placement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_placement

ihuman 7y ago

"Is that a PS Vita? I have a console at home; I play sometimes to relax. I oughta get one of these for the car" - House of Cards

lotsofpulp 7y ago
Yes, ruining the content itself is not better than pausing for ads.

mbrameld 7y ago

Isn't that just realistic, though? That's how dialogue in real life sounds, too. I and most people I know use "uber" as a generic term for a ride share service. We also distinguish which streaming service the show we're talking about is on if it's not already known by everybody in the conversation.

throwaway66666 7y ago
I see two big issues. The first one is about how well it is integrated in the show, or how "respectfully" it is done. Let's say for example... Car brands are very welcome and a must in the Fast and Furious movies. It would be pretty silly if they had fake car brands in such a movie, and the presence of real car models can excite and make the enthousiasts nerd out more about them. Overall a victory for everyone involved. But hearing how great of a family car a Volvo can be, in a movie about aliens... not so much. ------- The second is about transparency. Assuming you do not like let's say Monsanto, or Scientology and you would like to avoid works that are funded by them. Product placement is a form of guerilla marketing, noone says who they took money from. So it lacks transparency and is disgenius to the consumers. It's a bit like influencer marketing, when influencers "forget" to include the #sponsored hashtag. User ksdale has left a very nice comment on the subject.

scarface74 7y ago

I would much rather a TV show say “Let’s call an Uber” than “Let’s call a peer to peer ride sharing service”. Just like everyone says “I am going to Google that” not “I’m going to search for that”. One sounds stilted. The other sounds natural.