Some good examples here of companies looking to create a different way to engage the audience. And I even think that Hormel, makers of Spam, the meat, have become sponsors of the Monty Python show as well. And I think that the last paragraph is an excellent summation of what convergence should mean, not how we generally define it.
There are the well-known "The Apprentice" integrations, everything from the HotJobs.com taxi tops to Yahoo! Local tracking the two teams in the "Motel Mogul" episode battling it out to renovate two motels in Seaside Heights, N.J.As was reported in the "Just an Online Minute" last week, Yahoo! is also getting logo placement on Broadway, in the new musical, "Monty Python's 'Spamalot,'" the musical version of the film, "The Holy Grail" with the Yahoo! logo appearing on banners carried by guards in the cast. If you go to the musical's Web site (a very excellent site created by The Stevenson Studio) and mouse over the "Partners" icon, indicated by a bewildered looking man with a backpack on, you'll trigger the Yahoo! yodel.
Certainly product placement, so to speak, is nothing new. Other advertisers of all manners have been taking advantage of reality television programming's non-existent plots and tabula rasa non-fiction environments to fill with the wares they represent.
Bud Light and Doritos were regular fixtures on "Survivor" (perhaps they still are, I no longer watch). As was pointed out on the Spin Board, "The Amazing Race" had teams going to an Internet café to use AOL for retrieving their first clue.
But what Yahoo! has started doing, and no doubt other advertisers are planning, is more than simply product placement. These advertisers are placing themselves in contexts of flow, where they are a part of the natural order of events rather than relying on standing out like a sore thumb to be noticed. They are making themselves part of the fabric of our experiences.
The placement and/or use of a product serve as an impetus to learn more of that product or service in the context of another medium. By being a part of the "flow experience" the product or service becomes the catalyst for its own use, sometimes by inviting prospects to be part of the media experience representing it.
Yahoo! Local's keeping track of "The Apprentice" teams working on the motels in Jersey by keeping the public's score of the teams' efforts through Yahoo! Local's ratings and review feature, which allows consumers to give their thoughts about the experience.
What we have here is one of many examples of multiple touch points - surround sound marketing - being used to engage audiences in ways that do not disrupt their patterns of behavior, but rather seeks to become part of them.
Convergence, as represented by a surround sound marketing environment, is not a collapse of technologies enabling access into one device, it is a collapse of the distinction between actual experience and the representations used to mimic it for the purposes of selling things. It is becoming the flow experience of an individual's everydayness.
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