I've been thinking about this set of issues for a while. I'm actually in favor of novel sponsorship. In a several hundred page book, a woman used the word Bulgari a dozen times? That's possibly a lot less an effect than, say, the size of your average Renassiance Patron crouched in the background. Additionally, she's fairly open abuot the fact that she's sponsored. (Go try to find out who was responsible for product placements in a movie some time.) That, and I'm not looking for unbiased text in a novel. For that matter, my family has been very happily praying, every Passover, out of a Haggadah published by a major coffee company. [1] -- Textbooks would worry me. We already know about the effects of advertising in magazines, and periodically, we find a scandal about it. "You propose have an article on car fatalities across from our AutoCorp ad. Can you please not cover that topic in this issue?" Would a "textbook brought to you by the Tobacco Council for Healthy Lungs" really cover all the topics we expect in the cardiopulmonary referneces? Unconscious bias is a dangerous thing. I'm not so naive to believe in the true independance of schoarly knowledge: there are texts that a publisher will both modify quiet internal interests and that still cost too much money. I suppose, when it comes down to it, that I prefer to be naive, my bias implicit. Which raises interesting issues: if I knew the bias upfront ("The Crass Marketing Movie Triumph of the Decade!") perhaps I would feel better about having sponsored texts. Or would this lead to a sponsorship divide, where wealthier people would be able to purchase less-biased material than poorer people? Any way you slice it, PR people are still important. Danyel --- [1] Which has made its sponsorship both a cherished tradition, as mentioned in passing at http://aish.com/holidays/passover/articles/hot_air.asp and illustrated at http://www.jewishwomenexhibit.org/inside10.asp and controversial http://www.haggadahsrus.com/Long_reviews2b.htm ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jonathan Sterne" <jsterne+@pitt.edu> To: <air-l@aoir.org> Sent: Wednesday, September 05, 2001 12:58 PM Subject: [Air-l] Re: product placecment

At 12:01 PM 9/5/01 -0400, air-l-request@aoir.org wrote:

...

From: Barry Wellman <wellman@chass.utoronto.ca> Subject: [Air-l] Sponsored papers Folks, You've read the story about novelist Fay Weldon getting sponsorship from Bulgari jewelers for her latest book.

I too want product placement gelt! If it's good for hockey rinks, it's good enough for the American Sociological Review!

So here's part of my next paper.

Here's one to go with yours, Barry. I teach an intro to mass communication course where we start that semester by talking about political economy, and today we talked about media that are funded by advertising vs. media that aren't. One student (most likely a 1st year student) asked, in all seriousness, why textbooks didn't include advertisements so that they would be cheaper (I just got done comparing my 600-page _Technics and Civilization_ by Mumford with the latest issue of _Vogue_ which clocks in at 700 pages and sells for $12 less -- there's also economy of scale issues as well). My answer was that most professors would balk at assigning textbooks with ads in them. Again, she followed up with a "why" to that. So my answer was that a lot of us professors believe -- "and this may sound corny," I added -- in the sanctity and independence of scholarly knowledge. To place ads in textbooks would be to compromise that independence.

And to think, the advertising industry used to need PR people.

Best, --J