TV's New Brand of Stars

Each week, the cast of ABC's "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" faces a tough task—completely rebuild and transform every room in a house in just seven days. An even tougher task, it seems, would be to make hardware and appliances a heart-tugging emotional sell. Yet this reality hit, which airs at 8 o'clock on Sunday and is watched by 14 million to 15 million viewers, manages to do just that for Sears, its main sponsor. The chain's Kenmore appliances and Craftsman tools play front and center as the crew goes to work and designers go shopping. At the end of a recent episode, host Ty Pennington unveiled the completely rebuilt home of the Vardon family of Detroit (lucky families are sent on a vacation while the work is done). The emotional payoff for the family—the parents are both deaf, and one son is blind and autistic—is authentic and effective. And so is the marketing ploy for Sears, whose research shows that viewers are 25 percent more likely to shop at Sears after the show. The retailers' executives—who worked with ABC on the show before it existed and, in September alone, spent $3.2 million (a Nielsen estimate) on ads with ABC—refer to this kind of advertising as an "enhanced television media buy." But that's just jargon. Call it what it is: a pitch-perfect pitch.

And that's why shows like "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" are making Madison Avenue giddy. It's not just that the line separating programming and advertising has been blurred—it's been erased altogether, and marketers can't get enough of it. "Every advertiser is asking for it," says Mike Shaw, sales boss for ABC, which has dedicated a group to handle integration deals. And everybody who might be in a position to handle placements wants a piece of the action, and to set guidelines and prices in this new frontier: global ad agencies, reality TV producers, even Hollywood set decorators. Mediaedge:cia, an ad agency owned by WPP, estimates the fees paid for product placements in TV and movies totaled $3 billion in 2003. "All these people are trying to figure out what makes sense for what brand for what network," say Peter Gardiner, chief media buyer for Deutsch, which is working on placements for about 20 clients.

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