Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, March 5, 1995                   TAG: 9503040047
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: ELLEN GRAY KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

PRODUCT PLACEMENT ALSO CALLED 'FREE COMMERCIALS'

Rick Keppler is the guy who placed it there.

Keppler, president of Keppler Entertainment of Hermosa Beach, Calif., is in the product-placement business. What's product placement? The first sentence of this paragraph, for starters. In return for talking to a reporter about a practice that has created the unzap-pable commercial, Keppler requested that his company's name and location be included in this story.

He's counting on you to notice.

He's also hoping you've picked up on Jerry's KitchenAid blender, a product he said can also be found in the kitchens of NBC's ``Frasier'' and CBS's ``The Nanny.''

``Every major TV show has a KitchenAid appliance,'' said Keppler, whose company is paid a commission for placing the company's products in television shows and movies.

Well, not every major show. ``Roseanne wouldn't use a blender that's $100,'' Keppler said. ``We place it on `Mad About You' ... the placement has to fit.''

That doesn't mean there's no room for product placement on ``Roseanne.'' Dean Ayers, president of the Entertainment Resources and Marketing Association, a product-placement trade group, said that a beer placement would fit in with the image the producers of ``Roseanne'' are trying to project.

You'll see John Goodman drinking beer on ``Roseanne'' because ``they want to establish him as a blue-collar kind of guy, and beer helps,'' Ayers said.

People in the product-placement business like to refer to what they do as creating a ``win-win'' situation. While it's against FCC regulations for a show to accept fees to use a certain product without saying so (you'll often hear such announcements at the end of game shows), that doesn't mean the show doesn't benefit.

Research shows that consumers want to identify with the characters they watch on television and that seeing real products helps them to do that, Keppler said. Prop masters could go out and buy the stuff they need each week, but ``they have a limited budget, too.''

Enter the product-placement people. They'll pore over scripts, looking for opportunities to place their products. Sometimes, the movie studios and television production companies come to them.

Suzanne Forlenza, who has put Apple computers on half the desktops on television, said she is ``bombarded by requests'' from television and movie people.

``I cannot say yes to everybody. I pretty much get offered every film I want to be in, anyway.''

Apple advertises on television only in the quarter before Christmas, said Forlenza, manager of entertainment product placement and marketing for the computer company.

But year 'round, its Powerbooks and Macintoshes are all over the TV schedule.

When FBI Agent Dana Scully calls up her E-mail on ``The X-Files,'' she's using a Powerbook. Jonathan Taylor Thomas, who plays the middle son on ``Home Improvement,'' does his homework on a Powerbook, even though there's a Macintosh downstairs. This season, the cast of ``Hearts Afire'' appears to be putting out an entire newspaper on Powerbooks.

How can one measure the effects of product placement? While it's true that a 30-second advertising spot on a top TV show might cost $360,000 and that the same product could appear once, or all season, on the actual show at little or no cost, it's also true that you get what you pay for.

``When you buy advertising, you totally control the visual and audio portion, whereas with product placement you have very little control,'' said Ayers, who contends that it represents ``a fraction of the value'' of paid commercials.

On some shows, for instance, product logos are altered or obscured. And who's to say that Scully's Powerbook isn't just helping to sell laptop computers in general?

Michael F. Jacobson thinks a commercial's a commercial, and viewers have a right to know when they're watching one.

Jacobson, co-founder of the Center for the Study of Commercialism, and author of the forthcoming book ``Marketing Madness'' (product placement alert here), sees product placement as just one more way advertisers are ``sneaking'' their messages into television.