SeamBi Makes My List

SeamBi advertisement in How I Met Your Mother

Around the beginning of summer I wrote a post on product placement in films. The consensus I came to was that I don’t mind when brand-name products are in a shot as long they’re not placed there with the rhetorical purpose of trying to get me to buy them; and yes it is pretty easy to tell the difference. Brand-name goods are a part of our everyday life and so sometimes art just naturally reflects that. I reiterate all of this because a few days ago while listening to the AV Club’s new podcast, Reasonable Discussions, I found out about a new horrific step in the world of product placement, SeamBi.

What SeamBi stands for is seamless brand integration and what they do is a fairly incredulous kind of product placement that infringes on both the credibility of television shows and the time space continuum. SeamBi is a advertising company that takes current advertisements and essentially photoshops them into reruns of syndicated television shows. For instance, the photo I included with this week’s post comes from a four year old episode of How I Met Your Mother, yet features an advertisement this year’s film Bad Teacher, whose tag line ironically is “She doesn’t give an F.” Yeah, I guess not.

 There are essentially two problems I have with this kind of product placement. The first being that it disregards the environment that the characters inhabit in order to post garishly inserted adverts. Again in the photo above, what is inserted is not only the advertisement, but in fact, the entire TV; SeamBi, talked about this shot and how seamless the television is with its environment but I would argue this fact. Just because most shops have televisions, doesn’t mean that they all do. Whenever my friend and I want to go to a bar we will drive past first really slow, just to see what it’s like inside and one of the things that always makes us keep driving is too many televisions. It seems cruel to just disregard small aspects of the character’s life to just insert the latest ad for whatever, because all that the character surrounds themselves with adds to the personality of the character and how we see them. So where we once would’ve seen a “quaint” coffee shop, we now see a “chain” coffee shop and then that setting interrupts our read of the character and in turn, our read of the show.

My other main problem with SeamBi, is that it interrupts our perception of time. Now in a somewhat ethical, and I stress somewhat, the advertisements that SeamBi are inserting mainly just cover up older advertisements. So instead of seeing an early 2006 advertisement for product X, we now see a 2011 advertisement for product Z. Yet this is perhaps due to the limited technology and limited number of participating television shows; however, in the future who knows where a service like this could lead. Could we be seeing the Brady children carrying around copies of Rob Lowe’s new biography, or Kolchak leaning against a light pole pasted with The Zookeeper flyers? What if in ten years we sit down to watch an episode of Larry Sanders and all of a sudden Larry’s suits are fashionable again because the technology exists to update character wardrobes.

One of the charms of an older television show is to see how things were and remember them as they were. Will SeamBi doom us to a life perpetually void of media nostalgia? Now, like always, I am writing with a tone both sincere and ironic. I really do believe there is something ethically wrong in altering art to sell movie tickets, or peanuts, or shaving cream; and that although it is only affecting fairly contemporary sitcoms, this is a pandora’s box that could lead to altering advertisements in televised films and other art. I don’t know, maybe I’ll just wait for Nada to show up with my pair of sunglasses.

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