I enjoy watching TV, more than I like to admit. Over the years I've noticed that characters drinking has increased. So, I was wondering, is this a function of my evolving TV tastes or are our TV characters getting drunker by the day? Many articles document the increase in alcohol consumption in TV. One good example compared the show Friends to How I Met Your Mother. Friends revolves around a coffee shop while How I Met Your Mother revolves around a bar. My next question was, how much of this is product placement and is just TV shows trying to have more realism?
Many articles from 2006 talk about wine product placement. It says that paid product placement was increasing but that there are challenges for wine producers. One big issue is that you drink wine out of an unmarked wine glass so you really need to show the bottle or verbally talk about it. That is harder to work in then showing someone getting into a Ford or drinking a Pepsi. Additionally, even if you show a wine bottle, they all look so similar it may not be sticky for the audience. So while placement might help growing acceptance of the wine industry, it struggles to promote specific wines.
If anyone has any other information on this, especially about placements that have worked well, I would love to hear about it.
I've noticed too that specific wine brands usually aren't promoted directly. However I think one interesting example of a brand promotion is Kathie Lee Gifford on the Today show. It turns out that she actually has her own wine brand called Gifft (http://www.gifftwines.com/) which is what she is usually drinking on the show. I don't know that she spends a lot of time directly promoting it by name, but you could assume that some of her viewers will look it up if they are interested in purchasing it. To some extent her wine consumption has become a part of her own personal brand, which can be either a positive or negative depending on how you look at it.
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