The Stage

Burnham - ‘I am against product placement on TV’

Published Wednesday 11 June 2008 at 14:55 by Matthew Hemley

Culture secretary Andy Burnham has signalled today that the Government is unlikely to allow product placement in British television shows as part of its implementation of a new European Union directive.

The government is obliged to consider product placement as part of the EU’s Audio Visual Media Services Directive, which allows EU member states to make individual decisions on whether or not they allow product placement.

A UK consultation on the issue is set to get underway this summer and the government is due to give its final response next year.

However, in a speech to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s cross-industry Convergence Think Tank today, Burnham said the UK government would be against product placement, which he claimed would “contaminate” British TV programmes.

“There is a risk that product placement exacerbates this decline in trust [in television], and contaminates our programmes. There is a risk that, at the very moment when television needs to do all it can to show it can be trusted, that we elide the distinction between programmes and adverts,” he said.

Burnham added: “As a viewer, I don’t want to feel the script has been written by the commercial marketing director. If Jim Royle gets out of his chair for a Kit Kat, I want to think, ‘he fancies a Kit Kat’ - not, ‘Kit Kat my arse!’. If I thought it was because someone has paid for him to eat one it would change the way I felt about the programme.”

The culture secretary admitted he could see the “benefits of product placement”.

But he added: “Here and now I do want to signal that I think there are some lines that we should not cross - one of which is that you can buy the space between the programmes on commercial channels, but not the space within them. British programming has an integrity that is revered around the world and I don’t think we should put that hard-won reputation up for sale.”