• by Dana Blankenhorn , January 8, 2003

Just because I went to school with Jerry Seinfeld doesn’t mean I’m an expert on comedy.

What I learned from him is that comedy is hard work. In fact, it’s much harder to write comedy than just about anything else. (I’ve tried. All I am is “school yard funny.”)

But I did learn a lot about product placement from watching Jerry’s show. And what I learned tells me most of the product placements you’re thinking of are going to blow up in your face.

“Seinfeld” was filled with product placements. The writers found it much funnier to use real products than made-up ones.

Many shows, for instance, revolved around going to movies. But the gag only took off when Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss) went to see “The English Patient.” She hated it. It was funny because “The English Patient” was a woman’s movie. The placement, in other words, played against type.

Even when the placement ran with type, it only worked when real comedy was attached to it. Like Kramer (Michael Richards) dropping a Junior Mint into a patient during an operation. Or Elaine (again) eating Jujubes while visiting another hospital patient.

In those situations, Kramer and Elaine could rhapsodize about the products’ benefits, and that only added to the humor.

The lesson is that you don’t place ads into shows, in the form of products. You let the actors (and writers) react to the products as consumers react. You make them part of the show.

On “Seinfeld” this sometimes backfired. The “J. Peterman” character created for the show was hilarious, but the catalog went under soon after the show’s run. The show not only made the character ridiculous, it made the catalog’s buyers seem ridiculous. Of course I don’t think the placements there were paid-for.

And that’s the real danger with product placements. When money is on the line the sponsor is going to want things done just-so. The result is you lose the spontaneity, the sense of play, that makes a product placement memorable and worthwhile.

Placements have been part of movie-making for years, and usually the game is fairly simple. The product is either written-into the show (as with the cars in recent “James Bond” movies) or it’s simply placed on the set.

In the “Bond” placements, which I think are the prototypes for current thinking, the cars are not only driven and ogled, but the car makers produce ads that are also ads for the movie – one hand washes the other.

Movie placements, of course, are risky, because brands and companies die. In an early scene from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” for instance, one of the characters flies to the Moon via TWA. (The airline went under twice long before that year.) The placement, in the end, dated the movie.

And when products or companies are pitched inside shows, do writers lose their right to satirize?

One of my kids’ favorite placements is on an episode of “The Simpsons” where Lisa and her mom take a ride sponsored by the (late) Eastern Airlines ending with world domination by robots with airplanes for heads, all sporting the Eastern logo.

I guess my point goes back to the beginning. Placements are hard work. To work they have to be integrated with the show, they have to take the consumer’s view of the product (not the marketer’s), and they can’t seem like obvious plugs.

Like comedy, it’s risky business.