I love books and book stores. My favorite airport stop is the book store. I have actually missed flights while I pondered which books to buy. I also read the newspaper every morning and, creature of habit, still get the New York Times delivered to my home.
Dave, my friend and former business partner, is like minded, although he’s never admitted to missing a flight over a book and he switched to the Boston Globe many years ago. Several weeks ago Dave surprised me. He confessed he had gone Kindle. It wasn’t a proactive decision, Kindle was a gift, but now he is hooked and, like many early adopters, effusive in his praise for this new technological marvel.
That’s how I got interested in Kindle. Not interested enough to buy one yet, but the electronic reader is now on my radar screen. And that’s why a recent Ad Age story, “Showtime Taps Amazon’s Kindle for Advertising” caught my eye.
Starting in June Showtime is offering Kindle users a free download of the pilot script for it’s new series, “Nurse Jackie”, featuring Emmy award winner (Carmela Soprano) Edie Falco. The offer is being promoted with banner ads on Amazon and on the Kindle storefront. The script comes with cover art, show scheduling information, and a call to action to go to Sho.com to watch the pilot episode. The strategy according to Jon Haber, US Director of OMD’s Ignition Factory, is to “use the client’s content as advertising”. From a marketing perspective, I think this is pretty clever. From a consumer perspective, I think it is one more example of the blurring of the lines between entertainment, editorial content, and advertising.
You may remember from previous posts that the White’s are masters of the universe when it comes to channel surfing, pre-recording favorite shows, and generally avoiding TV advertising at all costs. Around the dinner table, we recently discussed how advertising has also started to infiltrate the books we read, that discussion prompted by my decision to purchase a $54 bottle of Don Julio anejo, the favorite drink of Dirk Pitt, Clive Cussler’s sophisticated adventurer and bon vivant.
Now that we have Kindle with direct internet access it’s not too far fetched to expect that the subliminal advertising included in our electronic reading will also include links to websites where we can buy immediately. It’s the next generation of the product placement strategy we now see all the time in movies and on TV. For some reason this new technology-driven strategy that mixes media seems more insidious. Maybe because it’s an attempt to catch us when we are most vulnerable, living vicariously through the adventures of a fictional character like Dirk Pitt. I’m an admitted Dirk Pitt fan but I’m not sure I can afford the quail pate and the ostrich tartare to go with my Don Julio anejo, chilled, served straight up with salt and a slice of lime.
Are we crossing the line by mixing media?
